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Reflect Orbital Sells Sunlight At Night, But Don't Trust That Fancy Video
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Reflect Orbital Sells Sunlight At Night, But Don't Trust That Fancy Video
It's... intriguing.
By Stan Schroeder Aug. 26, 2024
Reflect Orbital Sells Sunlight At Night, But Don't Trust That Fancy Video Credit: Reflect Orbital
> Tech
Turning night into day is something big meteors can do, but it might (one day) become as easy as firing up an app and tapping a spot on the map.
Reflect Orbital is a California-based startup that aims to sell sunlight and energy after the sun has set. They're doing it by sending a big mirror into space, aboard a satellite that's able to point said mirror in such a way to reflect the sun's light onto a precise location on Earth.
The startup isn't new; the company's founder and CEO Ben Nowack introduced it in April this year, during the International Conference on Energy from Space conference. "We want to make it as easy as possible — like, log into a website, tell us your GPS coordinates and we get you some sunlight after dark," he said at the time.
What's new, however, is the company's website, which now shows what using Reflect Orbital's services could look like in a very palpable, exciting way. On the site, you're prompted to "reserve a spot of light," with delivery beginning in "Q4 2025" (and applications closing in October). You can also move your cursor around a map to shine a spot of sunlight on a particular location.
A video, posted by Nowack on X, appears to show how this could work in practice. He uses an app to pinpoint a location on a map, and once he hits it, the actual, physical space he's standing on is illuminated. The camera turns up, and you can see a light shining from above.
There's something magical about the idea of having the power to bring actual sunlight to a location just by moving your finger around a virtual app. But is it actually possible? Is it smart to do? And would it really look exactly as portrayed in the video?
Probably not, at least not in the near future. Nowack himself later tweeted that the video was a "simple demonstration," with "still lots of work ahead" of the company. He doesn't make it clear where the light source in the video is coming from, like perhaps a drone (we asked Ben, and we will update the article when we hear back). But we do know that the company tested its mirrors on a hot air balloon, but hasn't got any satellites in space yet. In a video dated July 2024, Reflect's founders said they plan to launch their "first very large deployable reflector" in the next "four to five months," with getting that to space being "the next step."
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."
"By precisely reflecting sunlight that is endlessly available in space to specific targets on the ground, we can create a world where sunlight powers solar farms for longer than just daytime, and in doing this, commoditize sunlight," he wrote.
The company currently splits its website into two parts: Lighting and Energy, with the first one focusing on bringing a spot of sunlight to some point on Earth after dark, seemingly for fun. The energy part is about bringing the sun's energy to a solar farm at night, thus perhaps adding some extra juice to the energy grid in that location when it's needed.
Many questions arise, from whether Reflect Orbital's satellites can actually deliver enough sunlight for either of these applications, to whether an entire fleet of mirror-bearing satellites would pollute our skies with unnecessary light sources, to whether this (if used on a large scale) could disrupt flora and fauna on Earth (some of these questions are tackled by Nowack in this video). For now, the company displayed one thing: The ability to grab a lot of attention online.
