[deadbabe]

The revenue potential is huge. Think of public events where people might want to illuminate the area as daylight for several hours. Galas, sports, concerts, parties, etc.. They will all pay top dollar and they have the funds. Could get sponsors, "Today's sunlight brought to you by NordVPN"

[toss1]

How huge is it on a continuous basis? Ii's low earth orbit, so only available for a few hours after sunset, AND requires a new satellite in position every 15 min. So for two hours extra illumination you need to support a couple DOZEN satellites, costs of build, launch, control, and maintenance. Even with 100% bookings —every night— it is dubious finances. Seems much more like a scheme to generate a money flow from meme-investors they can siphon off into their pockets then oops, it fails.

If this is somehow an actual problem, it is far more solvable with tethered blimps or drones, battery pack in a container on a truck, a spool of wire, and light banks as big as you want. AND that isn't subject to clouds (but would be subject to high winds, which would also be more likely to cancel/postpone the event than clouds).

Meanwhile, they go beyond the already massive disturbance of existing terrestrial lighting and overwhelmingly screw up the biologically critical light signals used by every plant, insect, animal, and human in the zone, and do it at multi-kilometer scale.

Edit: Even if the revenue potential is actually huge, it is no justification. For any intelligent person, the actual sponsorship message will be "Tonight's lighting brought to you by [Insert_Company_From_Which_I_Will_Never_Buy_Anything_Again]

This level of stupidity is beyond evil — the kind of lunacy to make a good argument that humans should not exist.

[ben_w]

Here's a ninety thousand lumen floodlight: https://www.kaufland.de/product/500729350/?search_value=stad...

And a satellite isn't going to provide "hours" of extra light unless it's a very much higher orbit than current proposals. At 600 km altitude, you're talking 20-30 minutes even with an unbounded number of satellites (and 10-15 minutes when you've only got a few satellites). Same reason as sunset itself happens: Earth just gets in the way.

[roysting]

Opposed to holding the event during the earth's orientation towards the sun, aka daytime? Someone should tell the gala and event organizers about this idea of daytime.

[Chingers]

Frankly I don't see this happening before the year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

[dizhn]

I've read enough of it to get the reference.

[turtleyacht]

Same. By that point, I realized if that was one thing I got, I must have missed even more.

[Cthulhu_]

But they'd be competing with the old fashioned stadium lights. I don't think they would be cheaper somehow.

[moralestapia]

Rescue operations, etc...

I saw a presentation by one of the founders where he talked about several use cases where the benefit is just phenomenal.

They don't fool me for a second, however. The end goal of this is to build a weapon that can fry people/places on demand (but only the bad guys, of course).

[Robotbeat]

orbital mirrors make very poor weapons because Conservation of Etendue means you fundamentally cannot concentrate very high unless your fill factor is very high (which would require millions of tons in orbit). Lasers are far more effective as weapons as a single aperture launched on a single rocket is sufficient to get high concentration. Microwaves also.

The military application would just be illumination.

[moralestapia]

You don't need to go "very high", 80C is more than enough to wreak havoc.

I'm sure that's attainable with a few hundred sats.

Can someone do the math?

[kadoban]

Is it ever, ever going to be cheaper or easier or more effective than just launching a missile? Seems...unlikely just on the face of it.

[moralestapia]

Are missiles better than bullets?

Are bullets better than knives?

Each thing has its own place.

[kadoban]

Not every possible thing has real situations where it's better. There are legitimately terrible solutions to problems, that are dominated by better ones in every situation.

Like this, for example.