Annoyingly and predictably, reads like AI slop. You can practically guess the prompt goes something along the lines of 'write a press release explaining why this bad idea is a good idea'.
(Why, of all the things, would someone use a fire as their example for this? Fire is famously a light source. Also, famously, smoke is a thing that blocks out light from above).
Launching a gossamer thin mirror in space is not very expensive. Broad strokes claiming anything launched to space is going to be a more expensive solution has to level with the fact that GPS and quite a lot of telecommunications and Earth observation seem to have incredible leverage if launched to space instead of just using ground based solutions.
For this use, "gossamer thin" is unlikely. You want to control where you point the mirror, it needs a structure that not only doesn't flop around when you torque your spacecraft, but also doesn't have surprise vibrational modes that squeeze and expand the illumination zone.
(Things I'm learning while researching what is now looking like an eight thousand or more word blog post about why a different space thing, data centres, is also not a good investment; my guess is this would be less of a problem if you used mirrors like this to cool the earth by reflecting sunlight away instead of towards).
I know for a fact it is gossamer thin. It does need structure, but there’s a fundamental limit to how small your spot size is anyway due to Conservation of Etendue, so small deformations aren’t a huge problem.
You know "for a fact" anything about a tech which is currently in the experimental stage (or even "press release before first experiment" stage), in a field which has a famously large gap between theory and practice, confidently enough to assert it will definitely not suffer from the problems that mean the large sheet materials we already launch to space (space-qualified PV arrays) are much heavier than bare cells?
> Conservation of Etendue,
Sounds like you think I have in mind something like an Archimedes' heat ray. I do not see anything close to that for the presented satellites.
I would aver that the presented design is so far from being useful that making it useful requires solving enough engineering challenges to also enable an Archimedes' heat ray; but again: what is actually shown is not that.
The numbers I see from Reflect Orbital suggest they have an expectation of the apparent brightness fluttering by 5x from internal motion of the reflector. At the scale involved, may be easier to consider the imperfections/ripple as behaving the same as if some of the specular reflection becomes diffuse reflection.
I swear this is getting so common. “Well I’d be fine with eugenics and sterilization of the poor, but the website uses em-dashes a lot so I think it’s just awful AI slop”.