Startup Wants To Launch a Space Mirror (nytimes.com) 80
A startup called Reflect Orbital wants to launch thousands of mirror-bearing satellites to reflect sunlight onto Earth at night and "power solar farms after sunset, provide lighting for rescue workers and illuminate city streets, among other things," reports the New York Times. From the report: It is an idea seemingly out of a sci-fi movie, but the company, Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., could soon receive permission to launch its first prototype satellite with a 60-foot-wide mirror. The company has applied to the Federal Communications Commission, which issues the licenses needed to deploy satellites. If the F.C.C. approves, the test satellite could get a ride into orbit as soon as this summer. The F.C.C.'s public comment period on the application closes on Monday. "We're trying to build something that could replace fossil fuels and really power everything," Ben Nowack, Reflect Orbital's chief executive, said in an interview. The company has raised more than $28 million from investors.
[...] Reflect Orbital's first prototype, which will be roughly the size of a dorm fridge, is almost complete. Once in space, about 400 miles up, the test satellite would unfurl a square mirror nearly 60 feet wide. That would bounce sunlight to illuminate a circular patch about three miles wide on the Earth's surface. Someone looking up would see a dot in the sky about as bright as a full moon. Two more prototypes could follow within a year. By the end of 2028, Reflect Orbital hopes to launch 1,000 larger satellites, and 5,000 of them by 2030. The largest mirrors are planned to be nearly 180 feet wide, reflecting as much light as 100 full moons. The company said its goal was to deploy the full constellation of 50,000 satellites by 2035.
How much does it cost to order sunlight at night? Mr. Nowack said the company would charge about $5,000 an hour for the light of one mirror if a customer signed an annual contract for 1,000 hours or more. Lighting for one-time events and emergencies, which might require numerous satellites and more effort to coordinate, would be more expensive. For solar farms, he envisions splitting revenue from the electricity generated by the additional hours of light.
[...] Reflect Orbital's first prototype, which will be roughly the size of a dorm fridge, is almost complete. Once in space, about 400 miles up, the test satellite would unfurl a square mirror nearly 60 feet wide. That would bounce sunlight to illuminate a circular patch about three miles wide on the Earth's surface. Someone looking up would see a dot in the sky about as bright as a full moon. Two more prototypes could follow within a year. By the end of 2028, Reflect Orbital hopes to launch 1,000 larger satellites, and 5,000 of them by 2030. The largest mirrors are planned to be nearly 180 feet wide, reflecting as much light as 100 full moons. The company said its goal was to deploy the full constellation of 50,000 satellites by 2035.
How much does it cost to order sunlight at night? Mr. Nowack said the company would charge about $5,000 an hour for the light of one mirror if a customer signed an annual contract for 1,000 hours or more. Lighting for one-time events and emergencies, which might require numerous satellites and more effort to coordinate, would be more expensive. For solar farms, he envisions splitting revenue from the electricity generated by the additional hours of light.
This is DEFINITLY happening this summer! (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder what % of times it actually comes true when people say they're going to do ___ thing in space. 1%? .1%? .01%?
Probably less.
Re:This is DEFINITLY happening this summer! (Score:4, Informative)
I know. It seems like somebody comes up with a plan like this every week. [slashdot.org]
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Sounds like a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like a great idea (Score:4, Insightful)
And wildlife isn't having its circadian rhythms sufficiently disrupted by manmade lighting.
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Re:Sounds like a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends how much CO2 it offsets with solar generation. There could be a net benefit.
The other concern is yet another company wanting to launch a large number of small satellites, which emit on the way up, and then disintegrate in the upper atmosphere after a while. Research is already showing issues stemming from that.
Re:Sounds like a great idea (Score:5, Interesting)
In most regards I have to disagree on potential impacts, while on one, it appears uncertain.
Large rocket launches emit CO2 comparable (order of magnitude scale) to the emissions of a single transoceanic passenger flight (on the upper end of the spectrum, Starship + Super Heavy = 4,5x of a 747 at max range). If you were launching them at intervals comparable to transoceanic flights, then yes, that's an emissions problem, but nobody is looking at cadences like that in the real world as we know it.
Beyond CO2, ozone depletion from exhaust is an extra potential issue... but again, not really. First off, we're moving away from the three main types of ozone damage - SRBs (chlorine, alumina), kerosene (soot), and nitrogen-based oxidizers (NOx). Water vapour itself can also cause ozone loss, but nothing like the magnitude of SRBs. It's a real issue, but not an impactful one at any reasonable launch cadence.
As for direct dust impact, ~5000 tonnes of space dust burn up in Earth's atmosphere every year. At a high launch cadence you might meaningfully increase the burnup rate of specific metals, but even then there's no sign that that would be remotely harmful. Specifically because space dust is dwarfed by many orders of magnitude by terrestrial dust; dust is always blowing around through our atmosphere, at amounts that launches will never compare to.
The one case I've seen legit concern is with regards to increasing the amount of alumina specifically. That's one case where we can meaningfully increase the flux from space, and as above it's of concern for ozone destruction. Kind of. Or maybe just the opposite. Because as for direct atmospheric chemistry alumina doesn't, on its own, destroy ozone. It's harmful in SRB exhaust because it forms a catalyst surface that accelerates the rate of HCl destruction of ozone. But there is no concentrated stream of HCl in question here, just very sparse natural and anthropogenic chlorine sources. Perhaps a more notable effect might be what changes in upper atmospheric radiative forcings it might cause and how that might affect ozone levels. But this paper [wiley.com] which attempted to model it showed that - presuming that satellites continued to mainly be disposed of in the South Pacific - an order of magnitude increase in satellite entries would actually slightly reduce the southern ozone hole, by reducing polar stratospheric clouds. But they didn't simulate catalytic decomposition impacts, and stated that we don't yet have a good model for that.
So as for the first three issues, they don't actually appear to be meaningful. The latter is more of a concern, and needs more research, but I don't see any reason to panic about megaconstellations yet. We do need to keep an eye on it, though.
Re:Sounds like a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
If the number of launches reaches the expected levels to maintain these mega constellations, the effect has been modelled and found to be significant.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.... [wiley.com]
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
The satellites re-entering are an issue too, but one which needs a lot more study.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.10... [pnas.org]
I think the bottom line is that at best we don't know what the consequences of this will be, but they aren't likely to be good. Obviously there is a balance, if we can use space to reduce emissions or warming, but mostly it's just for stuff like Starlink and soon maybe some AI slop.
Re:Sounds like a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Your first paper is irrelevant right from the title: "The Climate and Ozone Impacts of Black Carbon Emissions From Global Rocket Launches". The launch industry is switching to methalox. It is not a meaningful black carbon producer. The paper at one point asserts, without reference, "Recently developed hydrocarbon fuels (including methane) are likely to produce BC similar to kerosene fuel", but this is absolutely false. I'm not going to bother reading the rest of the paper, but just from a skim-over I see a lot of stuff that's equally sketchy.
The second paper has the same issue - "Ozone losses are driven by the chlorine produced from solid rocket motor propellant, and black carbon which is emitted from most propellants." It however does refer to a switch to methalox - which is what's happening - as "actions ... key to defining an ozone-safe operating envelope for such vehicles".
It's exactly as I wrote: the worst offenders from exhaust are SRBs. Next is black carbon and NOx. Water vapor is not totally innocuous, but it's quiet minor by comparison. And contrary to the first paper's - and I must stress this, deeply wrong assertion - methalox is not a meaningful black carbon emitter, unlike LOX/Kerosene. Which is actually one of the reasons it's favoured for reusables, not just things like ISP - the high carbon production of LOX/Kerosene gunks up your engines over time, and increases the maintenance cost. Methalox burns quite clean. You can literally see it [preview.redd.it] - the reason why keralox burns so vastly brighter, with a red-yellow glow, is incandescence of the black carbon particles in it (like a lamp mantle). Methalox is almost completely clean by comparison, and thus appears as a faint blue. Kerolox also - unlike methalox - leaves a visible soot trail [preview.redd.it] behind it.
As for your final link: "Although direct health or environmental impacts at ground level are unlikely". And even that is heavily overselling the case. Reentering dust simply is not, and unless we get to Dyson Sphere-engineering levels, never will be - in meaningful quantities vs. terrestrial dust. One is talking about alumina quantities from megaconstellations on the order of 15kT/yr. Terrestrial dust is 25-30 MT *at any given point in time*. Coarse dust has a residence time of a couple hours, fine dust 1-2 weeks. If one assumes a mean residence time of dust of 1d, then the atmosphere gets an addition of 10 *gigatonnes* of dust per year. Megaconstellations are utterly irrelevant compared to that. You simply cannot compete with wind in the game of "adding dust to the atmosphere".
It does need more study, but that "more study" has nothing to do with dust in the troposphere. Rather, we need a good model of alumina catalytic activity *without* the HCl of a SRB's exhaust stream.
(And even if it were deemed a problem, satellite manufacturers would just switch to polymer-based materials for the bulk of satellites anyway and reduce the scale of Al deposition by an order of magnitude)
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Oh, and re: exhaust impacts, I forgot to mention: beyond all the above, atmospheric sensitivity to ozone loss is highly season and latitude dependent. And thus, a high degree of amelioration can be done merely by shifting times and locations of bulk launches.
Re:Sounds like a great idea (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's really inefficient. In order to be useful for power generation, the three square mile circle it illuminates would have to be completely full of solar panels in order to capture all the energy being reflected. And it it's as bright as the moon, that's about one half millionth as bright as the sun. So those solar panels, assuming no cloud cover, will be operating at one millionth the efficiency of daytime.
Meanwhile, battery technology, particularly for terrestrial power storage, keeps getting better and better. This has zero potential to offset CO2. Which is deeply sad for the science fiction geek in us all, but honestly, right now solar generation technology is starting to feel pretty science-fictiony, so maybe that's okay.
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You overestimate our civilization's ability to deploy reflector area to space.
Re: Sounds like a great idea (Score:5, Informative)
Let's 60ft*60ft. 400 square meters. That's 600kwh when it reaches the surface. 150 after panel losses. Multiply by $0.18 per... $30. Surely $5k an hour is typo. Right? Right???
Re: Sounds like a great idea (Score:5, Informative)
So I saw this, and the numbers person in me wanted to check... you're right (their pricing is insane).
My first thought; 60ft is the *test* satellite. 180ft for the production model, and thanks to squaring space, much more coverage. However;
180x180ft; call that about 3000 square meters. Using your estimate, that would scale to ~1,125kW after panel losses... so about $200/hour at the $0.18. Still ridiculously low compared to the nominal $5K/hour charges.
However it gets worse! The panel is supposed to reflect light "equivalent to 100 full moons" -- rather less than full sunlight.
A quick AI search indicates that moonlight peak power is about 0.3W per square meter... so 3000 square meters, about 900 watts for 100 "moons". Allow for ~25% panel efficiency, and we're down to ~225 watts -- not kilowatts, watts. At $0.18/kWH -- this is about $0.04 in theoretical electrical output per hour from a single satellite's reflected light.
As a way to keep solar farms running, this is insanely expensive. And that doesn't even start to think about the stationkeeping requirements of what amounts to a large solar sail trying to stay in a stable orbit *and* reflect sunlight in a tightly controlled manner...
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Ok.
So let's look at the numbers here, again.
For a solar farm, per the earlier calculations -- the fee to be split would be on the order of $0.04/hour, per satellite tasked to the farm. For someone wanting lighting, per the article, Reflect Orbital wants to charge $5000/hour/satellite (on contracts of 1000 hours or more), with higher amounts to one-time users. If I were Reflect Orbital, I would never bother tasking to solar farms --- I could make orders of magnitude more revenue providing lighting at even
Re: Sounds like a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
So a lighting user would be paying a crazy amount for very little light, against simply using terrestrial-powered artificial lighting.
I'm willing to bet the target market here is military. 100x moonlight to any location on demand is an operational capability that would be worth $5k/hr to any military on earth.
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Though I don't see how that makes any sense unless it costs more than $5k/hour to maintain and power a sh-t-ton of lamp posts. And maybe it does, I wouldn't know. Someone who runs a sho
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Don't worry they will only use it in colder regions. ;-)
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The planet isn't warm enough yet.
Simple solution: mirrors on the other side pointing away from Earth! :D
Ladies and gentlemen (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ladies and gentlemen (Score:4, Informative)
(shaking my fist angrily) Wernstrom!
An old trick (Score:5, Interesting)
If this was a sci-fi movie then that mirror would be a weapon. But in this case I assume it's less Spaceballs and more The Producers.
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Re:An old trick (Score:5, Interesting)
If this was a sci-fi movie then that mirror would be a weapon. But in this case I assume it's less Spaceballs and more The Producers.
Just give it time. Eventually, somebody will crack into the network and configure a thousand of them to all point at the same spot at the same time, and then a person or building will evaporate.
Re: An old trick (Score:3)
Re: An old trick (Score:1)
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They can even hack the whole constellation of 50000 and point it at you and you wouldn't even get sunburn. It's a grift. Someone did the math already on this and in the best case scenario, ignoring basically everything that makes this worse, you get a glow on the ground comparable to full moon.
Sounds like they're basically useless, then. That's clearly not enough to "power solar farms after sunset".
Assuming the 5 km area (presumably measured in diameter) has 19 km of solar panels, you could produce maybe 5 GW at peak sun by covering the entire surface with solar panels that track the sun.
The sun produces 400,000x as much light as the full moon. So if the entire fleet truly produces 100 full moons worth of power, that's 1/4000th of full sun exposure. 1/4000th of 5 GW would be 1.25 megawatts, or
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People overestimate how much "point sources" of light orbital mirrors can create. Reflect Orbital's light is spread out across a 5+km area. It's not concentrating a mass of light on a single person.
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If this was a sci-fi movie then that mirror would be a weapon. But in this case I assume it's less Spaceballs and more The Producers.
Just give it time. Eventually, somebody will crack into the network and configure a thousand of them to all point at the same spot at the same time, and then a person or building will evaporate.
That is basically the plot of the 1971 movie "Diamonds Are Forever." [youtube.com]
Re: An old trick (Score:2)
1000-fold "100 times the brightness of the full moon" gets you to about 1/4 the brightness of the regular moon day sun. So... not much of a death ray, there.
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If this was a sci-fi movie then that mirror would be a weapon. But in this case I assume it's less Spaceballs and more The Producers.
More likely, since we kinda suck at things we think we have control over:
"Sir, we've lost access to the control module for the mirror array."
"Reboot the service stations and see if you can't regain contact."
Several minutes later, "Connection can not be reestablished. Visual confirmation the control module was impacted by something moments before we lost contact. I have no procedure for how to correct this."
Mirrors drift, accidental overlap, buh bye, Chicago, or New York, or Tokyo, or some other city. Or eve
obligatory archimedes death ray (Score:1)
A non-paywalled link (Score:5, Informative)
Wave at it and smile (Score:3)
THIS!!! (Score:2)
This guy gets it, it just a matter of finetune and number of panels
"bright as a full moon" (Score:4, Insightful)
You can stare at the full moon all night if you like, because the albedo of the moon has filtered most of the light including the UV band that naturally passes through our own atmosphere. The three mile circle illuminated by a mirror would bounce a significantly higher amount of UV than the moon's albedo. If you treat the 60ft reflector as an analog to a pinhole in a pinhole camera, the circular area on the Earth surface would be a rough projection of the image of the sun.
(1) I wonder how they calculate the UV exposure for the observer on the surface within the illumination area.
(2) I wonder if you'd be able to detect places in a coherent projection where sunspots or coronal ejections are reflected through the "pinhole" effect of this arrangement.
What makes you think they care? (Score:3)
They're just looking for gullible VC funding that they can blow on high salaries and "entertainment" for a few years before the money is gone, they collectively shrug and say "oh well, we tried", then head off looking for the next scam they can fool rich suckers with.
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They're just looking for gullible VC funding that they can blow on high salaries and "entertainment" for a few years before the money is gone, they collectively shrug and say "oh well, we tried", then head off looking for the next scam they can fool rich suckers with.
Pretty much this. We've heard the space mirror meme so many times. Russia even had a pilot program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] in the early 1990s .
It was going to light up places like Northern Siberia.
But if the idea is to light specific areas It's going to need one hella constellation of the things, unless they plan on placing them in Geosynchronous orbit. Gonna get down into the weeds now...
Power generation. Well, we've had the concept of space based power generation a lot before as well.
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What about other frequencies? I've always wondered... radio works so well, why are they not considering stuff that works when thinking of these things? It sounds cartoonish, but why explore these ideas while picking LIGHT or microwaves?
Light is easily seen as a problem on cloudy days and microwaves get messed up in the rain.
Why don't these projects get into Xray lasers or radio wave lasers? stuff that passes thru the atmosphere best? sure, xrays sound bad; but any serious tech is always usable as a weapo
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What about other frequencies? I've always wondered... radio works so well, why are they not considering stuff that works when thinking of these things? It sounds cartoonish, but why explore these ideas while picking LIGHT or microwaves?
I'm 100 percent certain that the main goal of this effort is to get venture capital. There certainly are going to have to pay an EE a lot of money, because said engineer will be selling his soul. This all sounds plausible, at least until the Physics gets in the way. I liken it to the failed Waterseer project, which supposedly condensed water from the air to provide unlimited water for areas in the desert. It seemed plausible, until that boring stuff like enthalpy and entropy of vaporization comes along.
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Space X Rays sounds like a bond movie to me... but I think a data center would create a lot of happy IT people... although robots are better than humans already so it's unlikely any humans would ever go up there sadly.
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Space X Rays sounds like a bond movie to me... but I think a data center would create a lot of happy IT people... although robots are better than humans already so it's unlikely any humans would ever go up there sadly.
I'd take that space job in a second! Let's take that space job for a minute. I suspect that there would be some things a human needs to do much better than automation, at least my experience with computing. Sometimes troubleshooting needs a pattern weaver human to make connections AI can't do - and I wonder if it ever can.
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"Radio is an unruly beast, with different propagation characteristics depending on frequency"
Labelling a whole swathe of EM frequencies under the banner "radio" probably fools people into thinking they're all the same. It would be similar to calling everything from IR upwards beyond X-rays "light".
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"Radio is an unruly beast, with different propagation characteristics depending on frequency"
Labelling a whole swathe of EM frequencies under the banner "radio" probably fools people into thinking they're all the same. It would be similar to calling everything from IR upwards beyond X-rays "light".
Exactly. The propagation characteristics change by frequency - Up to around 2 MHz, at night, it might be worldwide propagation. During the day, local only. 7 MHz is similar, 14 to 17 MHz it is Worldwide during the day, then slams shut after dark, and at some point, it becomes line of sight only, except for weather thermal inversions, often called tropospheric ducting. The getting. high enough I frequencies, a rainstorm can knock them out.
I try to be delicate when explaining to people, because unless you a
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We've been using them for almost half a century. There's even a special name for them that you might be familiar with: Maser [wikipedia.org]. They work quite well in communications and have probably a large number of applications that I'll let you find for yourself if you're interested.
60 feet - 3 miles (Score:5, Interesting)
The light is reflected onto a patch 250 times as wide as the mirror, or 60,000 times the area. So it's going to be 60,000 times less bright than the sun. That's not going to generate much power.
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Yeah, but still 4,5x brighter than the moon. Useless for solar power, but a good start for nighttime lighting across an area the size of a typical city's downtown. If you read the article, the 60 foot design is just a prototype, they plan to go far larger.
Also, whatever you think of normal domestic uses, the military potential is obvious. Not silly fantasies of space death rays, but in terms of lighting up nighttime battlefields. Militaries have huge budgets for things like that, and existing means to ligh
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ED: did my math wrong - the sun is ~450000x brighter than the moon, so the prototype mirror would be 7,5x brighter than the moon (minus reflector losses, and potentially some variation due to different atmospheric absorption from the different spectrum).
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ED: did my math wrong - the sun is ~450000x brighter than the moon, so the prototype mirror would be 7,5x brighter than the moon (minus reflector losses, and potentially some variation due to different atmospheric absorption from the different spectrum).
You mean like clouds and haze? rain and snow scatter? Here in PA, we have a huge number of cloudy days per year. Making this lighting scheme useless, same for visible light power generation.
This concept of lighting up the dark and generating power from space has been discussed before, and Russia even tried the lighting up the night thing before. But it is really more the fever dreams of engineers after getting baked on weed gummies than anything actually feasible. Then the VC grifters take over.
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Except you still need city lights for the rest of the night (outside those few minutes when this is available, being in low-earth orbit) or cloudy nights.
Which means you aren't reducing the major capital and maintenance costs of city lights,
Lighting up the battlefield for both sides is noticeably less advantageous than lighting it up for yourself while the enemy stays in the dark. Especially with the limit of a few minute period of time tied to the Earth's orbit. A bit of light also doesn't solve the proble
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Their intent is a constellation, not just a single satellite.
You don't light up random battlefields at random times. There are times when it is advantageous for you that the battlefield be lit, and there are times when it is advantageous for the battlefield to not be lit. Versus things like
this has already been debunked (Score:2, Informative)
Re: this has already been debunked (Score:2)
Easily debunked with any basic level of physics and maths⦠These Tech Bro lunatic schemes are just scams.
This isn't new. Ideas for this have been around... (Score:2)
... since the 70ies. However, sending up thousands of micro-satelites to do this should only be allowed if they have enough fuel to de-orbit. Fast. If anything goes wrong we have an extra heater for the planet that we can't turn off. And that would be a really stupid thing not to be able to prevent.
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More global warming ? (Score:2)
Dupe. Dupe. (Score:2)
We've run out of space on Earth? (Score:2)
Space lasers (Score:2)
"For solar farms, he envisions splitting revenue from the electricity generated by the additional hours of light. "
Even the 100x scenario is still 4000x dimmer than sunlight. We are better off with space lasers.
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As long as there are billionaires funding it, they can throw away their stolen money...at least some engineers and scientists will be employed. Sadly, most the money will be wasted on MBAs trying to get rich themselves... but the theft cycle in this case is creating some STEM jobs.
If this works; obviously space lasers make way more sense... the energy losses are sizable and heat up the atmosphere which retains too much heat. Any serious usage would likely do more harm than just having more natural gas plan
Better Idea - Shade Disks at L1 Lagrange Point (Score:2)
Re: Better Idea - Shade Disks at L1 Lagrange Point (Score:2)
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I'd rather a weather control system. (Score:2)
I mean, wouldn't it be great if it only rained like midnight to 6am? Every day was sunny?
Open the Disasters menu. Select No Disasters. (Score:2)
Open the Disasters menu.
Select No Disasters.
Again? (Score:3)
Just remember, there's no such thing as a free launch.
Kessler syndrome can't happen soon enough (Score:2)
As a general rule, (Score:2)
It's a bad idea and should be stopped. Here's why (Score:1)
Here's an explainer, with a way to get involved to stop it:
https://darksky.org/news/orbit... [darksky.org]