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EEVblog 1637: Solar Freakin' Space Mirrors! - Reflect Orbital DEBUNKED

14 videos recommended on HN
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Cited on HN 4 times, 2024–2026, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN cites it as a debunking whenever the space mirror startup comes up, as a TL;DW that the design is impractical.

EEVblog's Dave Jones critiques Reflect Orbital's plan to sell sunlight to solar farms after dark using orbital mirrors. He walks through the numbers to show the idea does not work out.

4 critical · Commentary · news from the time

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@DemocracyFTW2 Oct 2024 Pushes back
on HN thread Reflecting sunlight from space to power solar farms at night
Read more
This has long been debunked e.g. by Thunderf00t ( [link] ) and EEVblog ( [this video] ) It comes as no surprise this won't work when you imagine 1) where you have to put the mirrors: either in low orbit so as to keep light dispersion low and the apparent mirror size from the ground big—but now you have the problem that the mirrors move with high speed relative to the ground, and the time frame where you can still reflect light before entering into Earth's shadow is very short. Or you put them into a higher orbit so they can reflect light for a longer time, but now the light spot that arrives on the ground is even more dispersed 2) how big these mirrors can practically become, and how little light there will be when you have a, say, 100m² mirror hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away.

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