California Startup Wants to Sell You Sunlight at Night From Space

Reflect Orbital, a California startup, has come up with an innovative idea of bringing back sunlight to your home after the sun sets.

The idea is to use satellites equipped with ultra-reflective mylar mirrors to bounce sunlight back to Earth using GPS to locate the position of its customers on Earth.

How It Works?

As per the company’s website, there is a registration process where customers can put in their coordinates and apply for sunlight at night.

CEO Ben Nowack said that the overall goal of Reflect Orbital to deploy 57 small satellites, each carrying 33-square-foot mirrors.

Test Generated Electricity

To test the feasibility of this idea, Nowack and co-founder Tristan Semmelhack conducted an experiment using a hot air balloon equipped with an eight-by-eight-foot mylar mirror.

They successfully reflected sunlight onto solar panels from a distance of nearly 800 feet, generating about 500 watts of energy per square meter.

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