What if you could order sunshine, even in the dead of night? Dive into the wild story of Reflect Orbital’s quest to beam sunlight from space—with military backing, wild investor dreams, and astronomers freaking out! Will this light up the world or just cause chaos? Watch to get the full scoop! Subscribe for more space adventures and comment your favorite moment from the video! #space #technology #innovation #astronomy #startups
👉 This channel was created in collaboration with https://www.youtube.com/@marschroniken
0:00 - Introduction and Main Idea
1:29 - Reflect Orbital and Technology
4:42 - Historic Attempts and Global Context
7:28 - Reflect Orbital Funding Overview
7:34 - Market Demand and Customers
9:11 - Technical Feasibility and Physics
11:13 - Opposition and Legal Issues
13:39 - Summary and Outlook
👉 This channel was created in collaboration with https://www.youtube.com/@marschroniken
0:00 - Introduction and Main Idea
1:29 - Reflect Orbital and Technology
4:42 - Historic Attempts and Global Context
7:28 - Reflect Orbital Funding Overview
7:34 - Market Demand and Customers
9:11 - Technical Feasibility and Physics
11:13 - Opposition and Legal Issues
13:39 - Summary and Outlook
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00Imagine you open a website, enter your GPS coordinates and order yourself sunlight.
00:08In the middle of the night, delivered from 600 kilometers up, right above your head.
00:15That's exactly the product a California startup wants to sell.
00:19Reflect Orbital has raised $35.2 million for it.
00:24The U.S. Air Force is contributing research funding, and in July 2026, the American Regulatory Authority actually approved the
00:34first Mirror satellite.
00:36Astronomers are up in arms, conservation organizations are demanding the license be revoked, and a new study crunches the numbers,
00:44calculating that the plant beams of light would be as bright as 10,000 full moons.
00:51The craziest thing about this story, however, is its age.
00:55The idea dates back to 1923, and the Russians actually implemented it back in 1993,
01:02when an artificial patch of light wandered across Europe at night for a few minutes.
01:08So why did the original fail?
01:10Why do the most renowned investors in Silicon Valley of all people believe in this revival,
01:16and what happens to the night if they turn out to be right?
01:19Let's take a closer look.
01:21My name is Servan, and this is Mars Chroniken.
01:29Chapter 1. Sunshine on Demand
01:33Reflect Orbital is based in Hawthorne, California, practically within sight of SpaceX.
01:39And that's no coincidence.
01:41Founder Ben Nowak was an engineer at SpaceX.
01:44His co-founder, Tristan Semmelhack, came from the drone delivery service Ziplime and dropped out of Stanford at the end
01:52of 2022 to pursue it.
01:55Since founding it in 2021, the two have been working on satellites with huge deployable mirrors that are designed to
02:04direct sunlight straight to the Earth's surface.
02:07Initially after sunset and before sunrise, later if the company gets its way around the clock.
02:14The first test satellite is called Eärendil-1, named after the mariner from Tolkien's Silmarillion, who carries a shining jewel
02:22as the morning star across the sky.
02:25It is supposed to deploy an 18 by 18 meter mirror in a sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of
02:32600 to 650 kilometers.
02:35At its core, the thing has a tightly stretched mylar foil, the kind you know from the thermal insulation of
02:41spacecraft.
02:42It weights only 16 kilograms and unfolds using an origami-style design, designed by engineers that reflect-poached from NASA's
02:53Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
02:55On the ground, that's supposed to create a spotlight about 5 kilometers in diameter, with about 0.1 lux.
03:04That is roughly equivalent to the light of a full moon.
03:07The company wants to illuminate 10 locations worldwide with this demo mission.
03:11In July 2026, the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC for short, approved the satellite's operation.
03:19It is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 later this year.
03:25As of today, in early September 2026, Eärendil-1 is still on the ground, and the demonstrator is only the
03:33prelude.
03:33The operational satellites are supposed to have mirrors measuring 54 by 54 meters, nearly 10 times the surface area.
03:42And the numbers in their plans have skyrocketed.
03:45In 2024, NOVAC was still talking about 57 satellites that would provide solar parks with an extra half hour of
03:53sunlight.
03:53By the end of 2025, there was already talk of 4,000 mirrors.
04:00In the documents filed with the FCC, there are now mentions of up to 50,000 satellites.
04:05And in the long run, the company wants to place mirrors so high that they could illuminate a location continuously.
04:11It is important to understand the business model that the product is not the satellite itself.
04:17The product is a minute of sunlight, delivered to coordinates of your choice.
04:24NOVAC basically describes it as customers logging into the website, entering their GPS coordinates, and getting light.
04:34As simple as ordering food, except the sun is the commodity.
04:38Chapter 2. The Soviets were faster.
04:41Anyone who thinks this has never been tried before should check out our Issue 182 from July 2025.
04:49Because this story begins over 100 years ago.
04:53As early as 1933, the rocket pioneer Hermann Obert outlined in his book
04:59The Rocket into Planetary Space, gigantic mirrors in orbit meant to direct sunlight purposefully onto the Earth.
05:07Things then got serious in the collapsing Soviet Union.
05:10The engineer Vladimir Sirom Yatnikov, famous for the docking mechanisms of the Apollo-Soyuz mission,
05:17originally wanted to build solar sails.
05:20When money ran short, he pivoted the idea and turned the sail into a mirror
05:25intended to illuminate Russia's dark polar regions.
05:29Work longer, heat less, use less electricity for lighting.
05:33That was the promise to the backers.
05:35The project was called Znamya, Russian for Banner.
05:38In October 1992, a progress freighter launched with the experiment on board.
05:44And on February 4th, 1993, near the Mir space station,
05:50it deployed a 20-meter film mirror, which kept its stability through rotation.
05:56A patch of light, about 5 kilometers wide, roughly as bright as a full moon, raced across Europe that night.
06:04From southern France all the way to western Russia, hidden behind clouds for most people.
06:10A few hours later, the mirror burned up as planned.
06:14Its successor, Znamya 2.5, with a diameter of 25 meters, ended badly in 1999,
06:22when the foil got caught on an antenna of the progress freighter during deployment and tore.
06:28After that, the money ran out.
06:31The planned 60-meter mirror, Znamya 3, was never built.
06:36And the idea was shelved for a quarter of a century.
06:40In 2018, the Chinese city of Chengdu announced an artificial moon
06:45that was supposed to replace street lighting starting in 2020.
06:50It never flew.
06:52So China is worth a look here too for comparison.
06:55But this time, the lead actually lies in California.
06:59Before we get to the money, a quick note on our own behalf at this chapter break.
07:03If stories like this grip you, mirroring space exploration history and the present day,
07:08then our newsletter at marschronican.space is right up your alley.
07:13There, you'll get the research behind the videos,
07:15topics that don't make it onto the channel, and all additions first.
07:20The link is in the description.
07:22Thanks to everyone who supports the channel through it.
07:24You are the ones who make this depth of research possible in the first place.
07:28And now back to the question of how much money actually lies behind abolishing night.
07:35Chapter 3.
07:36The money and the customers.
07:38The answer is surprisingly little for so much fuss.
07:42In September 2024, Reflect Orbital raised 6.5 million US dollars in seed capital.
07:49Led by Sequoia Capital, the fund whose last space investment had been SpaceX.
07:55In May 2025, followed by 20 million US dollars in a series A round from Lux Capital, Sequoia and Starship
08:04Ventures.
08:04In addition, in June 2025, there was a research contract of 1.25 million US dollars from the Air Force
08:13Research Laboratory
08:14and the innovation arm F-Works, awarded under the Small Business Innovation Research Program, SBIR for short.
08:22According to industry data, that makes a total of 35.2 million US dollars as of 2026.
08:29For comparison, that's less than what a single Falcon 9 launch costs.
08:33Still, the demand seems real.
08:36By the end of 2025, the company counted more than 260,000 inquiries ranging from construction site lighting and major
08:46events
08:46to disaster relief and search and rescue missions.
08:49And specifically from the military, which is interested in on-demand light over operational zones
08:55as proven in black and white by the F-Works contract.
08:59However, the originally advertised core business is something else.
09:03Namely, illuminating solar farms at dusk.
09:06Exactly when electricity demand is high and the sun is no longer available.
09:11And at this point, we need to talk about physics.
09:14Chapter 4.
09:15Can this really help solar farms?
09:19The inconvenient truth begins with the fact that the sun is not a point source.
09:24In the sky, it has an apparent diameter of about half a degree.
09:28And that's why, in principle, a flat mirror at an altitude of 600 kilometers
09:33can't focus its light any tighter than onto a spot roughly 5 kilometers across.
09:39So, the collected energy of an 18-meter mirror ends up spread out of an area the size of Manhattan.
09:46That's why, Arundel 1 only delivers full moon brightness, around 0.1 lux.
09:52Whereas, the midday sun reaches about 100,000 lux.
09:57For solar cells, that's practically nothing.
09:59The company points to a balloon test where, according to their own data,
10:03a mirror at an altitude of 3 kilometers delivered 500 watts per square meter to solar panels.
10:09From 3 kilometers, mind you.
10:11Not from 600 kilometers.
10:12The study by astronomer Miroslav Kozifej from the Slovak Academy of Sciences
10:17calculates that in the final phase, even 400 bundled mirrors in the target area
10:22would only reach 2.4% of the sun's brightness.
10:27Yet the basic idea isn't scientifically absurd at all.
10:29The University of Glasgow is investigating kilometer-sized reflectors
10:33at an altitude of 1,000 kilometers in the Solspace Research Project,
10:38led by Professor Colin McInnes, funded with 2.5 million euros by the European Research Council.
10:45The simulation results indicate that 20 such reflectors could provide future solar farms
10:50with an average of about 2 additional hours of light per day.
10:54That translates to an additional 728 megawatt-hours of electricity per day.
11:00It's just that the researchers are talking about kilometer-sized structures
11:04and expressly about future massive solar farms.
11:08Between this concept and a 16-kilogram mirror, there are several orders of magnitude.
11:14Chapter 5.
11:15The revolt against the light.
11:17Because while investors are discovering the night as a market, astronomers see it as a crime scene.
11:24Cultify's study, accepted by the astrophysical journal Letters, concludes that a single operational
11:29reflect satellite would appear about 40 times brighter than the full moon in the target area
11:35and would still reach full moon brightness 14 kilometers away from the center of the light cone.
11:40400 combined mirrors would reach a brightness of 10,000 full moons in the target area
11:48and their glow would still be visible on the horizon from 80 kilometers away.
11:55Olivier Hainaut from the European Southern Observatory had previously modeled that a fully developed constellation
12:02could brighten the night sky globally by up to 300.
12:06Astronomer Samantha Lawler considers the concept completely unfounded.
12:11Incompatible with astronomy and the preservation of dark skies.
12:15Reflect Orbital disagrees.
12:18CEO Novak calls the study's assumptions inaccurate and points to protective measures such as observatory
12:25exclusion zones.
12:26But according to Cultify's account, he has so far failed to provide the specific figures.
12:31A notable side detail in its own filing with the FCC, the company admits that looking at its
12:37satellites through telescopes with an aperture of more than 12 inches, meaning roughly 30 centimeters,
12:43could be unsafe for the human eye.
12:45In August 2026, an alliance including Dark Sky International and the American Bird Conservatory
12:52therefore urged the FCC to revoke the approval and to conduct a comprehensive environmental review
12:58retrospectively, also due to potential consequences for aviation and wildlife whose circadian rhythms are disrupted by artificial light.
13:07To be fair, both sides of the story need to be laid out on the table.
13:11Space law expert Michelle Henlon certainly sees real benefits, such as longer operating hours for solar power plants or light
13:19for remote areas and disaster zones.
13:21But she points out the real sticking point, because the FCC is only authorized to approve the satellite's radio transmissions.
13:29For the light beam itself, the actual product, simply no authority in the world has jurisdiction.
13:35The night has no lawyer.
13:37Honest assessment.
13:38Let's summarize soberly.
13:40The demo technology is plausible and affordable.
13:43The permit has been granted.
13:45As of the script's completion on September 2nd, 2026, the launch was still pending.
13:50The physics of light concentration is unforgiving and makes the advertised solar business on a small scale questionable.
13:58While serious research like Solspace relies on kilometer-sized structures for the same purpose.
14:04I don't believe that Reflect Orbital will enable any significant solar power generation anytime soon.
14:10For that, the amounts of energy delivered are orders of magnitude too small.
14:15I consider it more likely that the high-paying customers, in the end, will be the military disaster relief and
14:22events.
14:23And the F-Works contract points directly to that.
14:25At the same time, I take the astronomers' warnings seriously.
14:28Because here, a communications regulator is effectively deciding in the process what the night sky looks like for all of
14:36humanity.
14:37Znamiya once failed due to a lack of money and a snacked foil.
14:40Sales survey.
14:41Whether the new attempt fails because of physics, pushback or nothing at all, may become clear in the coming months.
14:48And we'll keep you posted.
14:50My name is Siervan.
14:52And this was Mars Chroniken.
14:55Thanks for tuning in.
14:56Per aspera ad astra.
14:59Empires.
15:01For more
15:01Per aspera ad astra.
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