[imagesource:wikimediacommons]

Now, even sunlight is for sale.

I thought it was bonkers when Nestle dared sell oxygen, although it is unclear what happened to that plan to privatise the air.

These days, another mad startup is using science to sell the sun at night. Reflect Orbital is a California-based startup that aims to sell sunlight and energy after the sun has set. This is something that big meteors can do, but it might (one day) become as easy as firing up an app and tapping a spot on the map.

They’re doing it by sending a big mirror into space, aboard a satellite that’s able to point said mirror in such a way as to reflect the sun’s light onto a precise location on Earth.

A few years ago, VICE spoke with Reflect Orbital’s founder and CEO, Ben Nowack, about his plans to generate solar power at night.

“I had an interesting way to solve the real issue with solar power. It’s this unstoppable force,” Nowack said in the interview. “Everybody’s installing so many solar panels everywhere. It’s really a great candidate to power humanity. But sunlight turns off. It’s called nighttime. If you solve that fundamental problem, you fix solar everywhere.”

But like, living beings also need nighttime? It’s a part of the natural cycle of things. This playing homo deus is going too far.

Nowack introduced it in April this year, during the International Conference on Energy from Space conference. “We want to make it as easy as possible — like, log into a website, tell us your GPS coordinates and we get you some sunlight after dark,” he said at the time.

New things to play with on the website! pic.twitter.com/NJcOjFSblf

— Ben Nowack (@bennbuilds) August 22, 2024

The company’s orbital mirror is set to launch in 2025, and you can “apply for sunlight” for the next few months. There’s “limited availability,” and already supposedly over 30,000 applications. It really just sounds like a one-time test, though: you only get four minutes for a diameter of 5km. No price is listed.

As magical as this all seems, it is probably not smart or achievable, at least not in the near future. Nowack himself later tweeted that the video was a “simple demonstration,” with “still lots of work ahead” of the company, which doesn’t even have satellites in space yet.

With 30,000 applications and only a narrow window in which a satellite can aim a mirror at anything, the idea feels painfully limited, even if it ever manages to get off the ground. But Reflect Orbital’s ambitions stretch far beyond just one satellite. According to Nowack, the company is scheming to deploy an entire constellation of satellites to “sell sunlight to thousands of solar farms after dark.”

Great, just what we need. More satellites to hide the stars.

[source:vice]