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Comment by upofadown | Hacker News Reader

>SpaceX plans to send one million more satellites into orbit, for space-based data centres, ...

I think we should wait to see how the first satellite data centre works out. It seems fairly unlikely that it could be practical. It seems kind of nuts...

>Reflect Orbital, a US start-up, aims to launch a constellation of very large mirror-like satellites to provide sunlight at night, with reflected beams that span at least five kilometres on Earth's surface.

Straight up nuts with no practical value, even if it did work out.

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> I think we should wait to see how the first satellite data centre works out. It seems fairly unlikely that it could be practical. It seems kind of nuts...

I strongly suspect that what'll happen is SpaceX does launch satellites with onboard GPUs, so the SpaceX hypemen can go "the skeptics said it couldn't be done!" and take off before the actual, more crucial question of "does it make _financial_ sense?" is answered in the extreme negative

Indeed. Even optimistic estimates say SpaceX have to launch about 370,000 tons to LEO before they get the costs down low enough to be worth launching them on pure financial grounds.

I suspect Musk reaches pension age before that happens.

Sure, but you think they’ll invest in a million of them?

I expect it to be more like servers that cache frequent content, to reduce the round trip delay.

There are many feasibility and safety issues associated with the Reflect Orbital plan. It doesn’t make as much sense as you might think. For instance, the satellites can only illuminate areas a relatively short time after local sunset. The Sun reflection could potentially damage an amateur astronomer’s eye if one of the satellites crosses their telescope’s field of view: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/true-cost-solar-powe...

SimCity 2000 solved this problem 26 years ago: just beam the power down as a tight microwave beam. Granted, things get messy when the beam accidentally sweeps across your city, but such is the cost of progress.

I can think of several practical uses. It would be very useful immediately after a disaster. Lighting up the night would make search & rescue much more effective. It would also allow for more solar power generation in an area, reducing pollution. Extra light at high latitudes in the winter would reduce seasonal depression.

Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs? I don’t know. But there is practical value to lighting up the night.

> Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs?

No. Lighting up the night is an abomination. Reflect Orbital can go fuck themselves.

It doesn't work out anyway. If you work out how much light these satellites can reflect it is practically nothing and certainly not economically viable. The company seems to be little more than a way to extract money from fools.

>>Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs?

Hell NO!!

Ubiquitous on-the-ground lighting is already disrupting plant, animal, and insect life cycles.

Adding a blanketing sun reflector illuminating five-plus square kilometers at a time will obliterate critical signals to everything living there, and won't do any good for the humans.

And nevrermind the astronomy.

It is an abomination and nothing but a scheme by amoral people to separate other fools from their money.

Mindblowing that people are actually ok with this

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