Plan to Reflect Sunlight to Power Solar Panels at Night Upsets Astronomers
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-06/sequoia-backed-startup-faces-pushback-over-plan-to-reflect-sunlight-to-earth?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc1OTc2MTIyOCwiZXhwIjoxNzYwMzY2MDI4LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUM1BKWThHUEZJMEowMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiIwQjVFMDM3MDAzMzc0Q0NCQUUxNzE4QkU3ODk5NDQ0MSJ9.Ley8_sSaPJO4pyhlMbu7fcQHveiIZY-SRQDAxghrCQo
17 Comments
It should upset more than just us lmao. Ecosystem fuckery for one.
And beyond that, do you people really trust governments and corporations hyper commercialising everything to not mistreat the fucking sun?
Another dumb tech bro idea.
“Let’s try and sell an idea that on the surface is super cool and sci-fi but the moment you do any math about it, the whole thing falls apart.”
This shit is so hard to implement.
And even if this would turn out as good as they want to then none will be able to stop big tech giants from misusing it.
I want a giant mirror in space that will reflect the sun at where I’m standing at all times. So at night I’ll have a beam of light shining on me at all time. While I’m driving at night or even just sleeping in my house, a beam of light will always be shining on me.
Among the first things to build when you get back to the moon: a telescope. Then another. And another. Earth has become unwelcoming to astronomers. Time to move uptown, where there is no atmosphere and lower gravity, so you can still walk around and install huge reflectors.
Men will do literally anything before investing in new battery technology. Even float ideas from corny 80’s scifi.
I don’t understand this well enough but isn’t that a terrible idea for most flowering type plants? If they can’t tell day from night aren’t they just gonna stay in their vegetative state?
I mean I see it’s backed by VC which makes me think no one at the company is thinking about anything but money.
And they’ll have an added benefit of shading the earth during the day to help reduce global warming! Brilliant!
I feel like it would be cheaper and more useful to spend money towards creating a solar panel with a higher energy absorption rate than what we currently have … say 4-10x current absorption rate should allow for a much more sustainable and useful product
it does make me question, the biggest argument against solar is it only works for 1/3 the day. what if we just sent electricity all around the world? earth always has a face facing the sun.
the math probably doesn’t work out (yet), but maybe at some point.
Economy of this system is mostly determined by how cheaply can you manufacture how thin mirrors.
If they plan to put those mirrors in SSO, what they probably will do, this system will be unable to generate light pollution far from the terminators, so the middle of the night is not treated.
Yes, enough batteries to get 24/7 power from renewables is expensive, but it’s definitely not “launch a bunch of mirrors into space to power our solar panels at night” expensive.
These grifters are just objectively bad people — selling snake oil, hyping up their rich friends to pump money into cash grabs, and gaming out favorable media coverage. It’s enragening
How much energy could a panel generate from a light equivalent to the full moon? Doesn’t seem like it would be cost effective at all
There’s plenty of roofs out there to increase our daytime production
From a technical and economic viewpoint I don’t really see why this isn’t feasible. The cost to huck a kg of material to LEO is going down an order of magnitude because of Starship. LEO constellations that can point themselves and coordinate are a solved problem. Deployable mirrors are doable. People would pay money for sunlight at their solar farm. So yeah, this can be built. TBD if it would be profitable, but Sequoia Capital thinks so.
From a philosophical standpoint this is concerning. Ecological effects would be pretty extreme to have 24/7 sunlight within Reflect’s 5km diameter minimum spot size. Animals (including humans) don’t like that. Also weaponization of the sun seems like a road we collectively don’t want to go down.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|——-|———|—|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1nzna0w/stub/ni6y3kk “Last usage”)|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[NG](/r/Space/comments/1nzna0w/stub/ni49udl “Last usage”)|New Glenn, two/three-stage orbital vehicle by Blue Origin|
| |Natural Gas (as opposed to pure methane)|
| |Northrop Grumman, aerospace manufacturer|
|[SSO](/r/Space/comments/1nzna0w/stub/ni41cga “Last usage”)|Sun-Synchronous Orbit|
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