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by potamic 18 days ago
Wut? This has to be some sort of a scam. There's no way you're going to be reflecting enough light from hundreds of kilometers away.
3 comments

It's not. USSR and Russia experimented with space mirrors and was able to light significant territory. It was a successful program, but in 1993 Russia had no money to continue the project, so it was wrapped up.
It works fantastically well for construction and military applications.
Based on what? You get the light of the moon for about 5 minutes.
I’m pretty sure the plan is to have tens of thousands of them so that they can hand off from one satellite to the next. I know this tech would have been fantastic when I used to work on oil rigs in super remote locations.
It still would only work close to sunrise or sunset. You cannot get hours of extra light this way.
Oh wow, that would pretty limiting. Thank you for that heads up!

I see that from the 400 miles altitude they filed with the FCC, you'd expect them to be able to provide maybe an extra 2 hours before + after sunrise/sunset near the equator. However, that appears to improve to almost 4 hours at 50 degrees latitude - assuming 30 degrees of elevation is sufficient for the light to not get too scattered through the atmosphere. If you assume a much more conservative 60 degree elevation requirement then it would be 3 hours before+after sunrise/sunset at 50 degrees latitude.

It also depends on the season, but this has a much smaller effect than latitude.

Shortening the night by a combined 6-8 hours might be quite useful for operations in Ukraine which occur near 50 degrees latitude.

That's really not correct, simply based on where their satellites will be and the orbits they must follow. Do you work there or something? The whole thing is an obvious scam. None of what you say is realistically possible in practice.
I really hope it's a scam, because if not, and this is allowed to exist, we're fucked.
oh dear, the stakes are so high