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Why a California Startup Wants to Put Thousands of Mirrors in Earth’s Orbit

A California startup wants to build a giant mirror in space to bounce sunlight back to Earth after the sun goes down.

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A California startup wants to put giant mirrors in space to bounce sunlight back to Earth after the sun goes down. It’s an insane sentence describing an even more insane, borderline super villainous project that actually would have some real tangible benefit for us here on earth.

The New York Times reports that Reflect Orbital, based in Hawthorne, is developing satellites designed to reflect sunlight onto specific areas of the planet at night. It’s a simple goal: they want to extend daylight hours.

The company says that reflected light could power solar farms after sunset. Or it could help illuminate disaster zones and even brighten city streets, though I don’t know how many city dwellers will want a brighter city when they’re trying to sleep.

A California Startup Wants To Put Thousands Of Mirrors In Earth’s Orbit

The plan is to build a prototype satellite carrying a mirror around 60 feet wide. If regulators approve the launch, the test spacecraft could reach orbit this summer. From about 400 miles above Earth, it would reflect a beam of sunlight onto a circular area of about three miles wide. Someone looking up at it from the ground would see a bright dot in the sky about as bright as a full moon.

Should the project get the go-ahead, the company’s long-term vision is to deploy 1000 satellites by 2028. And then 5000 by 2030. Eventually, they want to create a constellation of 50,000 mirrors by 2035.

Some of those satellites would scale with the company’s ambitions, reaching up to 180 feet across. All of this is an effort to create a customer base that can buy sunlight on demand with pricing starting at around $5,000 per hour.

While this does raise questions about whether or not we need more junk floating in space than there already is—and there is a lot of it up there—the pitch itself is seemingly climate-friendly. And there is a ring of logic to it.

While battery capacitors that trap solar energy are constantly improving, a simple fact remains: the source of solar power goes away when the sun goes down. The company argues that reflected sunlight could extend the productivity of solar farms and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

This is a company looking to make an enormous amount of money selling sunlight during off-hours, so of course, they’re going to paint a rosy picture of it all. Scientists and astronomers who spoke to the New York Times are skeptical, to say the least.

There is a growing concern about a cluttered Earth’s orbit, currently jammed with satellites and a myriad of broken ones, all flying around at preposterous speeds.

Adding tens of thousands of space mirrors is just begging for one or several of them to be decimated, thereby creating a snowball effect that generates even more space debris, which can damage even more satellites, and so on.

There are also ecological questions. Artificial nighttime light can disrupt our circadian rhythm here on Earth, as well as animal migration and plant flowering. Animals, insects, and plants can be completely thrown out of whack when they are suddenly illuminated at night.

The project doesn’t seem entirely misguided and would provide some tangible benefit here on Earth. Still, some major questions need to be answered, and some big damage assessment studies need to be conducted before we fill the earth’s orbit with mirrors that shine light on us when we’re all trying to sleep.

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