50,000 satellites to light up the Earth.

They are a network of giant satellites that function as mirrors to provide light to specific areas of Earth. The company is called Reflet Orbital, and it plans to launch this constellation of giant mirror-shaped satellites to provide sunlight at night to specific areas of Earth. Each satellite would cover about 5 km on the Earth’s surface.

And they plan to launch 50,000 enormous satellites by the year 2035. They really are enormous—keep in mind that a Starlink satellite is about the size of a desk. These are supposed to be 10 or 20 times larger, and they want to launch 50,000 of them to provide light to specific areas of Earth.

They would be the brightest satellites ever placed in orbit, and with 50,000 of them, you can imagine what that would look like. I don’t know what astronomers will make of it—and they aren’t opposed to satellite constellations; in fact, they’ve negotiated extensively with SpaceX and acknowledge that SpaceX has made serious efforts to reduce the glare from its satellites— but the fact is, there’s a million of them—and that’s not even the only one. They’ve calculated that low Earth orbit could have around 100,000 satellites, which would be much more dangerous or disturbing, because all of them would be in low Earth orbit—and as for this whole mirror thing, I still don’t get it.

The whole mirror thing is old news; the Soviet Union tried it first. The Soviet Union launched a mirror satellite that reflected sunlight and put it into Earth’s orbit, and what was bound to happen happened: if it’s in low Earth orbit, it has to move at thousands of kilometers per hour. And sure, it was cool—it lit up the Earth, yes, it reflected light onto you, and you could even see it almost like daylight—but it was moving at a speed of thousands of kilometers per hour. Suddenly, you’d see a patch of light approaching, it would pass over you, light you up, and move on.

The satellite was in motion; it couldn’t keep a fixed area of Earth illuminated. For it to keep a fixed area of Earth illuminated, it would have to be a geostationary satellite, at an altitude of more than 35,000 km—and that would mean building a massive satellite, for starters. And second, you wouldn’t be illuminating a specific area because, well, you might want to illuminate a city, for example, and save a lot of money on streetlights and so on.

You might find this interesting: in geostationary orbit, you don’t just light up a city—you light up an entire country, almost an entire continent—and the scale of the problem would no longer be the same.

I don’t know how they’ll coordinate it, but I think the trick they’ll use—since there are already 50,000 of them—is that even if one passes by and spends only a short time over the area, another one will come right away to light it up. I suppose that’s the trick, because in China they also tried this recently—about five years ago—to create what they called an “artificial moon,” which was also a giant mirror satellite that illuminated an entire city; it would also be in low Earth orbit, not in geostationary orbit.

But the idea wasn’t to light up the entire city all night long, but rather to extend what would be dawn and dusk—that is, to gain an hour on either end—which would also save quite a bit of money on street lighting. that was the plan, and in the end, I think it didn’t work out, or it didn’t move forward, or it’s been shelved in some drawer or filing cabinet to see if it might come up in the future—which it might.

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