There are a few basic things in life that should be free for everyone: water, education and sunlight. Sadly, there’s now a Californian startup hoping to monetize the latter with a fleet of mirrored satellites that offer on-demand sunlight. In order to show off what the tech could one day do, Reflect Orbital released a dystopian video that looks as janky as the startup sounds.
The idea behind Reflect Orbital is simple: a former SpaceX intern wants to send a bunch of reflective satellites into space that can be moved about to direct sunlight wherever he wants. The thinking behind this wacko idea is that solar farms in the future may want to pay for more daylight, which could help them create more green energy. Right.
The program got off the ground earlier this year and so far it’s attempted to show off its concept by attaching mirrors to hot air balloons, reports Mashable. Now, the company is preparing to take things up a notch and will reportedly start launching its mirrored satellites into space in the next “four to five months.”
To create some buzz around the launch, Reflect Orbital released a video to try and show off what its satellites will be capable of. In the short clip, two excitable young boys are playing about with an app that lets them move a spot of sunlight around, even directing it towards right where they’re standing. The scene then gets a tiny bit brighter, before the camera pans up to a crisp, artificial light above them. As Mashable adds:
Despite the fact that the video is dubious, the demo was a successful attention-grabber. Co-founder and CTO of Reflect Orbital, Tristan Semmelhack, wrote on X that the company already has “30k applications for a spot of light and climbing every second,” and that it “10x yesterday’s count in just a day.”
With 30,000 applications and a limited amount of time in which a satellite can point a mirror at something, the idea seems quite limited in scope, even if it ever gets off the ground. But Reflect Orbital’s ambitions are larger than a single satellite. According to Nowack, the company is developing an entire constellation of satellites “to sell sunlight to thousands of solar farms after dark.”
If Reflect Orbital manages to get one shiny satellite into space, it’ll take the startup more than three years to work through all the applicants even if they all only want one hour of sunlight. Clearly, then, the startup is going to want more and more satellites in space to try and cater to demand.
However, as Futurism reports, most satellite launches cost upwards of a million dollars, it’s going to take a long time, or a lot of very expensive bookings, before the business can be branded a financial success:
We’ve reached out to the startup to ask about the financial elephant in the room and haven’t yet heard back, but if we had to guess, we suspect it’s not exactly going to be cheap given that even the cheapest and smallest satellite launches are estimated to cost about a million dollars.
There’s also a non-zero chance that this whole endeavor may be a wash considering that aside from one brief moment of Russian success, other attempts to mirror sunlight from space have failed.
So while the clicky video has done wonders in creating buzz around Reflect Orbital, it feels like it’s raised more questions about the startup than it’s answered. Chief among those queries is do we really need reflective satellites in orbit above the planet?
Engineers are already struggling to find ways to clear all the space junk out of our orbit as tens of thousands of chunks of trash float aimlessly above the planet. Will a few extra shiny satellites be a valuable use of the rapidly dwindling real estate up there?
