It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Reflect Orbital's fucking stupid giant mirror satellite, with absolutely NOTHING useful to offer, which will cause countless safety issues, ecological disasters, and destroy the night sky, is going to launch.
A bunch of astronomers and I have sent out a fact sheet about them to a bunch of journalists, but very few are going to write about this. So, let me try posting it all here.
Here's what I know about Reflect Orbital and all the downsides:
Reflect Orbital (RO) https://www.reflectorbital.com/ wants customers to pay them to reflect beams of sunlight down from
orbit. This is called “sunlight as a service.”
Their initial plan is for each beam to be several times as bright as the full moon and at least 5 km in diameter on the ground.
https://www.darkskyconsulting.com/blog/the-dangers-of-sunlight-as-a-service
Due to the high speed needed to orbit Earth, each satellite will shine on one point for only
a few minutes at most (Reflect Orbital says 4 minutes https://thetundradrums.com/reflect-orbital-order-sunlight/)
@sundogplanets Unbelievable. @pluralistic did say that rent-seekers would try to control solar energy, but this is just beyond ridiculous.
@ygor @sundogplanets @pluralistic
There's an old (1970s?) cartoon (which I can't find right now) of an executive behind his big desk.
"You want oil?" he asks. "We own the oil wells."
"You want coal? We own the coal mines."
"You want nuclear? We own the uranium mines."
"You want solar? We own...er...um...solar doesn't work!"
@negative12dollarbill @davidtheeviloverlord
Cracking cartoon.
We lived in B/W in the 1970's. There's a yellow tinge in the cartoon which might be an artifact of some sort or added later. It might be the colour of the page when scanned but the yellow tinge is not consistent.
Prof. Sam Lawler
Ygor
D. G. Marshall
Negative12DollarBill
Jon Gerdes
Chris Hodges