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FCC Approves Reflect Orbital's Space Mirror Satellite That Astronomers Hate (ca.pcmag.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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[–] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It's more of a "sure, you can waste money on that" sort of approval.

People don't really understand the scale of what's needed to actually put large structures in space. Or in this case 50,000 satellites.

The plan is horrifically bad, but also completely unfeasible.

The FCC shouldn't be enabling this scam, but I'm not that worried.

Or no more worried about this scam than any of the dozen of active scams by semi-competent tech bro billionaires.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    It's not horribly large, really. It's a super thin reflective film that unfolds.

    It does seem like it would need way too many in the sky to be financially viable. Like, the cost would be much more prohibitive than paying for land and probably like 15% more solar panels to get the equivalent amount of solar electricity. Not to mention the global warming of 50,000 of these to be directing 3 mile areas of extra sunlight.

    I say let them build and launch one to see what it can do, but never let them stick up 50,000.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    This is a wild take.

    Space mirrors are not a new idea, they're a very old one, a staple of sci-fi only now being tested in reality.

    They stated that this is a small scale demonstrator, just to test the technology. The goal would be to get some real world measurements and decide on whether it could be economical and realistic going forward.

    What part of that is a scam? I would say it's perhaps overly optimistic, but it's a perfectly honest exploration of engineering.

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