Startup Says It'll Use Huge Space Mirror to Sell Sunlight During Nighttime

I hear those things are awfully loud.

Absolutely. Another deranged idea from another idiot asshole from the techbro community.

Literally the opposite of what Mr Burns did.

Who cares about the environment! We have investors to grift! Money to be made!

Yeah, it's boring.

I want a Starliner intern to come up with something.

Btw, Starliner undocked the space station, set course back to earth and must have landed, uncrewed, 2 - 3 hours ago. That was the plan, at least.

Edit: Here it is after undocking the station, showing off it's glorious thrusters:

it’s a SpaceX intern’s idea.

It's older than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_mirror_(climate_engineering)

Space mirrors are satellites that are designed to change the amount of solar radiation that impacts the Earth as a form of climate engineering. The concept was first theorised in 1923 by physicist Hermann Oberth[1][2][3][4] and later developed in the 1980s by other scientists.[5] Space mirrors can be used to increase or decrease the amount of solar energy that reaches a specific point of the earth for various purposes. They have been theorised as a method of solar geoengineering by creating a space sunshade to deflect sunlight and counter global warming.[5][6]

There have been several proposed implementations of the space mirror concept but none have been implemented thus far other than the Znamya project by Russia due to logistical concerns and challenges of deployment.[5][7]

The Znamya project was a series of orbital mirror experiments in the 1990s that intended to beam solar power to Earth by reflecting sunlight. It consisted of three experiments the Znamya 1, Znamya 2 experiment, and the failed Znamya 2.5. The Znamya 1 was a ground experiment that never was launched.[17] The Znamya 2 was the first successful launch the Znamya project had. It was attached to the unmanned Progress M-15.[17]The deployment resulted in a bright light of a width of 5km and with the intensity of a Full Moon being shined.[17] The Znamya 3 was proposed but never acted upon because of the failure of the Znamya 2.5.[17] The project was abandoned by the Russian Federal Space Agency after the failed deployment of the Znamya 2.5.[7]

Dude, I read about it in a 1990 donald duck (true actually, +/- some years).

This. This I could get behind.

I imagined Mr Burns blocking out the sun, charging for sunlight.

Also I thought about who I would deliver middle of the night sunlight to, definitely not out of spite.

This right here. Never mind the dystopian Mr. Burns style subscription based sunlight control bullshit that's inherent to the very idea. That's just to sucker in the investors who won't know any better. Not enough people are talking about this.

I guess they could try to put the thing into some kind of geosynchronous orbit, but essentially the surface area of their mirrors will have to be equivalent to the area on the ground they plan to illuminate in order to achieve "sunlight" levels of illumination. There's no way around that. So motherfuckers are going to start spouting off about "parabolic dishes" and "lenses" and shit any minute now. This is a red herring. No amount of optics can overcome the fact that the amount of light you can reflect will never be more than the amount of light that hits the mirror. Period. You cannot, now or ever, defy the laws of physics.

The International Space Station is basically the biggest thing we've ever managed to permanently put into orbit, yeah? And you can barely see it with the naked eye in the night sky, let alone measure any meaningful amount of light reflected off of it hitting any square inch of ground anywhere, with any instrument you can come up with. And it's covered in reflective shit already -- in fact, most manmade orbital objects are, in order to prevent the direct sunlight baking the fuck out of them in the vacuum of space where they can't rely on the atmosphere to carry the heat away.

At best, even if they manage to deploy a massive Mylar foldable mirror in orbit that's hundreds of feet across, they're only going to be able to light up a small patch of dirt like wussy old moonlight, and even then they'll only be able to do it in one place. Adding more targets will by necessity divide the light output in a linear fashion even if they somehow make it work like a huge DLP mirror array.

This simply can't work.

Yeah ok but the video... Explain that!

Its light during night time. Not daytime...