Reflect Orbital plans a constellation to enable solar power generation at night, make crops grow better and stronger, possibly replace urban lighting, provide emergency illumination in disaster zones and enable people to work into the night.
By 2030, Reflect Orbital the plan is for constellation of 4,000 of giant mirror satellites, circling Earth in a sun-synchronous orbit following the boundary between day and night.
Reflect Orbital would deploy thousands of lightweight mylar mirrors in low-Earth orbit (LEO) to reflect sunlight onto solar farms during twilight, night, or high-demand periods, effectively extending daytime generation. Their initial test satellite (EARENDIL-1, launching 2026) features an 18 meter × 18 meter mirror. The full constellation scales to 54 meter × 54 meter mirrors, with 4,000 units targeted by 2030 (potentially expanding to 250,000 long-term).
Sun-synchronous orbit at ~600-625 km altitude, enabling pole-to-pole passes aligned with terminator (day-night boundary). Each mirror weighs ~16 kg and deploys in orbit, appearing as a bright moving star from ground (4× brighter than full moon when viewed directly).
They would have a 6 km diameter light spot (28 km² area) per mirror. This is determined by the Sun’s 0.53° angular diameter projected from orbit (spot diameter ≈ 0.0093 × altitude in km).
A single 54 meter mirror delivers 0.04 W/m². This is 30,000× dimmer than midday Sun’s ~1,000-1,360 W/m². It would be double a full moon’s 0.002 W/m². Stacking 5,000 mirrors on one spot yields ~200 W/m². This would be 15-20% of daytime Sun. This would be enough for partial solar panel operation. This would be 3-4% output boost at 20% panel efficiency.
They would need far bigger mirrors in order to get useful large solar farm energy boosting.
22 million (each delivering ~2.6 kW total reflected power at 90% efficiency, spread over 28 km²).
Significant Partial (200 W/m², 20% Sun): ~4.4 million. This would be viable but exceeds their 250k max. It covers a giant solar farm in ~2-3 min bursts. It would need ~1,000 handoffs/hour for continuity.
For 1 GW farms, hybrid ground battery storage outperforms mirrors economically today (~$0.05/kWh vs. $0.10+/kWh mirrored).
9.3 km diameter mirrors needed for full Sun. However, current thin films seem to limit to ~150-200 meter for practical near term systems. There is work to massively scale in orbit sizes but the in orbit manufacturing are unproven.
The systems would guarantee massive light pollution for astronomy and unknown side effects to disrupt animals at night. Reflect Orbital would not be able to meaningfully add to solar power on the ground without larger systems and even more disruption.
Nextbigfuture has covered the prior plans in China and NASA studies.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
It’s like these people are hellbent on destroying the night sky and washing out even the planets and bright stars. I feel like we’re dealing with the in real life versions of Montgomery Burns who puts up a giant sunshade to deny the people of Springfield the sun only they’re doing it to the night sky just to power their solar panels. At this point, tripling the land area covered in solar panels and making more batteries would actually have less environmental impact. Oh and get ready for every species of animal with circadian rhythms to get wrecked.
So the general idea Is to increase effective solar influx on earth surface to make global warming worse?
The general effect of CO2 in the air causes an increase of 0.1% of infrared radiation remaining in the atmosphere. 0.1% increase in the amount of sunlight hitting earth surface will have the same effect. Obviously is not trivial to achieve such an increase but spending time and resources in that direction seems insane.
Haven’t we already discussed this concept before? Yes, we have.
Not to rehash all the problems, (There are many!) basically, it’s just got a terrible duty cycle unless you go to a high orbit, in which case the spot size becomes the size of a state, and you need an absolutely enormous mirror to get a significant light level.
The VC that gave them $20 million and the SBIR $1.2 million grant issuer needed to consult us about the problems. Previously discussed around 2015-2018 when china was using a giant mirror to light up Chengdu at night
20,000,000 divided by 250,000 satellites is … mmm … 80 bucks a satellite.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/10/chengdu-launching-satellite-to-create-8x-full-moon-lighting.html