Picture this: You’re sitting comfortably in your living room on a winter’s evening, reading a book by the fire, when the sky suddenly starts to shine brightly. Intrigued, you get up from your couch to take a look outside and see that it’s still as bright as day despite the late hour. Is it a meteor that’s about to seal the fate of humanity, much like the dinosaurs did 65 million years ago? Has the nuclear apocalypse of the Fallout series just begun?
Wrong: it’s just a neighbor who just ordered a delivery of sunshine from space with his smartphone! If this scenario seems completely ridiculous to you, it’s not the case with Reflect Orbital.
Like a Znamya tune
This Californian startup, which emerged from the shadows last April, seems to have recovered a concept imagined by Russian engineers from the Znamya project in the 1990s. This name refers to a satellite initially intended to prove the viability of the solar sail concept, as NASA is trying to do right now with the ACSSS.
But faced with skepticism from policymakers, engineers pivoted to another goal: converting the sail into a huge 20-meter reflector for redirect the Sun’s light towards the Earth, in order to benefit from a source of solar energy even at night.
At first glance, this audacious concept was not entirely without meaning. Even before the turn of the millennium, the intermittent nature of photovoltaic energy already represented a significant obstacle to the mass adoption of this virtually infinite energy source. But the return to reality was quite brutal.
The Znamya 2 satellite did manage to produce a bright area 5 km in diameter that crossed Europe from one side to the other – but its brightness, barely greater than that experienced during a full moon, was far too low to power a solar power plant.
Undeterred, the engineers tried again a few years later with Znyama 2.5, which was supposed to provide significantly greater brightness. But this successor never achieved its goal. Its large mirror tore off the vehicle’s antenna during deployment, sending the vehicle back to burn up in the atmosphere. The project was abandoned following this failure, and no one has pursued this crazy idea since.
Reflect Orbital takes up the torch
Or at least, that was the case until Reflect Orbital picked up the torch. At the International Conference on Energy from Space in April, the company revealed its plan to provide on-demand solar power in the dead of night, also using a satellite equipped with a massive mirror. “We want to make this process as easy as possible — you log into a site, put in your GPS coordinates, and we’ll send you light,” founder and CEO Ben Nowack told Mashable.
Just recently, founder and CEO Ben Nowack posted a video showing what this might look like in practice. It shows a person entering their location into a smartphone app, only to see their location lit up like daylight by a bright dot that suddenly appears in the night sky.
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New things to play with on the website! pic.twitter.com/NJcOjFSblf
— Ben Nowack (@bennbuilds) August 22, 2024
The person concerned made it clear that it was only a ” simple demonstration ” and that the concept was still far from being mature. But this video still had its little effect on Internet users. On the firm’s website, which already offers ” pre-order ” a bright spot, bookings increased tenfold in the space of a day, with more than 30,000 potential customers on the counter.
But contrary to what this viral communication campaign suggests, the ultimate goal of Reflect Orbital is not only to offer a space spotlight to individuals in need of distraction. Like the Znyama project, the startup aims to ” sell sun » to solar farms at night to maximize their yield. And this is where the project becomes quite mind-blowing. The least we can say is that there are many reasons to be skeptical.
A mountain of technical and economic problems…
For starters, reflecting enough light to power solar panels would involve deploying an absolutely enormous mirror, probably several tens of meters in diameter. But this may well be impossible in practice. The Znyama 2 reflector was about twenty meters long, but it was very inefficient, so much so that it could not even be considered a real mirror, strictly speaking. And it is hard to see how Reflect could do much better.
To be convinced, just look at the JWST, NASA’s formidable space telescope. It is equipped with the largest orbital mirror in the history of astronomy, with a diameter of 6.5 meters. The American agency would have liked to aim for a larger size, but it was simply impossible, the bill was already devilishly high; the machine cost NASA a whopping 10 billion dollars!
This is largely because this mirror is a true feat of engineering. It is a beryllium surface coated with pure gold, manufactured and adjusted with absolutely extraordinary precision to eliminate the slightest imperfection likely to deteriorate the images. Suffice to say that the slightest extra centimeter would have made the bill explode again. It’s hard to imagine how a startup like Reflect could achieve sufficient diameter in this context.
Granted, the company wouldn’t need the same level of optical perfection as NASA. But even with lower-quality panels, the Price tag for a device of this size would still be staggering. To deploy the JWST, NASA had to divide its mirror into 18 segments so it could fit inside the Ariane 5 capsule. Applying this concept to an even larger mirror already seems very difficult, even impossible with our current technology. Furthermore, it would take an absolutely enormous launcher to put it into orbit. With the exception of SpaceX’s Starship, which is not yet operational, there is no vehicle capable of deploying such a huge craft.
To top it all off, Reflect will have no chance of delivering a compelling service with a single device. It would probably take a whole constellation of them.with all that this implies in terms of cost and orbital space requirements. Indeed, a single craft placed in a fixed orbit will not only be unable to serve several customers at once, but it would also suffer from a major efficiency problem.
Solar panels are notoriously sensitive to the angle of radiation; as soon as you deviate from the ideal 90% incident angle, the efficiency of photovoltaic cells drops off rapidly. Reflect should therefore have many vehicles in various orbits. And Even under these ideal conditions, the yield would probably be quite pathetic.
As you will have understood: at present, it seems highly unlikely that the Reflect Orbital project will reach maturity, at least in the short or medium term.
…and a relevance that is at best questionable
And even if that were the case, one can also imagine a myriad of other potentially problematic factors. For example, it is common knowledge that light pollution is already a significant problem today, both on the surface and in space.
It is known to disrupt the biosphere and the circadian rhythm of humans. It is also a very annoying prospect for astronomical observations. More and more scientists are complaining that the images from their telescopes are regularly photobombed by the reflections of objects that are quite discreet in absolute terms, such as Starlink satellites. This trend has already delayed, or even ruined countless scientific studies; we’ll let you imagine the result with a whole armada of solar mirrors pointed directly at the Earth…
It will therefore be interesting to follow the evolution of this startup, if only out of curiosity. The saga is likely to be quite entertaining, if not promising!
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