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This company wants to sell you sunlight at night from space (www.vice.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Reflect Orbital, a California startup, has opened applications for anyone who wants to use a satellite with a mirror on it to reflect sunlight to a specific location on Earth after dark. You might be wondering: What?

A few years ago, VICE spoke with Reflect Orbital’s founder and CEO, Ben Nowack, about his plans to generate solar power at night.

“I had an interesting way to solve the real issue with solar power. It’s this unstoppable force,” Nowack said in the interview. “Everybody’s installing so many solar panels everywhere. It’s really a great candidate to power humanity. But sunlight turns off. It’s called nighttime. If you solve that fundamental problem, you fix solar everywhere.”

The company’s orbital mirror is set to launch in 2025, and you can “apply for sunlight” for the next few months. There’s “limited availability,” and already supposedly over 30,000 applications. It really just sounds like a one-time test, though: you only get four minutes for a diameter of 5km. No price is listed.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Why? Because they can. Has zero practical applications

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Unironically, they probably want to weaponize it for military applications.

Something that gets forgotten about with OceanGate was that they wanted to rent the subs to various militaries for undersea cable sabotage. The tourism stuff was just for advertising.