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Another scam.
Your company went nowhere but you got paid for all your hard work.
I don't know if this is how it works but it is how imagine it.
This doesn't seem like something private organizations should be allowed to do.
or the government, for that matter
It's just another musk style nut job doing but job things complete with obligatory LOTR reference to really rub in the crazy.
Why are they so fucking obsessed with stealing names from LotR?
Because they recognize how amazing it is. They just fail to recognize they're exactly what it warns against
It's a European racist thing about using it as the 'white' origin story.
How else will there be anything cool about the company?
It's an interesting concept. But knowing capitalism it'll soon be used and abused.
/We can't have anything nice.
Reflect Orbital's satellite, Earendil-1, features an adjustable "highly specular, thin-film reflector" for directing sunlight, and a built-in propulsion system that's supposed to help it avoid collisions and otherwise maneuver while in low-earth orbit. Reflect Orbital imagines operating a Starlink-esque network it can position for on-demand sunlight (powering solar panels or increasing visibility for search-and-rescue teams), but for now it'll test its premise with a single satellite.
Starlink-esque network it can position for on-demand sunlight
This sounds extremely expensive and impractical.
That sounds like the logical next step for the space industry. Intermittence is a big problem for PV installations, this partially solves it.
Beside the obvious diurnal health impacts, solar PV doesn't work well when shaded and relies quite a bit on diffuse light to keep the array producing during those edge of day times when it is economically hard to make the modules spread out enough to avoid direct sun shading. Pointing reflected beams from arbitrary directions in the sky turns out to be very likely to create unusual shade lines that will render the light nearly unusable by the panels.
Then of course since they are planning to locate the reflectors in high-angular-velocity low earth orbit even if the angles are briefly conducive to power conversion it won't last very long and then some fossil fuel generator is going to have to bobble their throttle to fill in the gaps.... which is the worst possible scenario for using solar power (equal amounts of fossil generation as PV needed so no displacement).
What do you mean by "shaded"?
And I think the idea is to have several satellites taking turns at illuminating a given target. Your diesel generator (actually nuclear power plants where I live) will have to turn on anyway without these additional sources, but they lower the need.
Until they reach the endgame of being able to produce continuous illumination all night long.
I mean just that. Rows of solar panels on flat roofs or ground mounts are spaced just far enough apart that when beam illumination hits them that there are normally no shade from one row to the next... but that assumes that the light is coming from a well-known band of locations in the sky where the sun is. Strong differences in illumination cause PV to work as well as the lowest irradiance level, and in the case of beam-reflected irradiance from a rapidly moving source location that won't be restricted to "where the sun usually is" and because there will basically be no significant diffuse irradiance from the satellite mirrors the arrays will frequently be suffering from unexpected shade which will make them terrible at converting the reflected light.
fcc???
“The new satellite had to go through FCC approval because of the radio spectrum it operates on…”
thanks. Its kinda sad in a way.