Reflect Orbital: A start-up that is aiming at adding values to consumers’ lives by making it dusky during the night.
The Califonia based start up company, Reflect Orbital has aimed at achieving the goal of creating day in the night environment. This sidereal project seeks to sell the radiant heat of the sun at the close of the day using a totally unique method.
Selling sunlight: an idea that comes from sidereal
The start-up aims to launch a large mirror in another orbiting satellite which will allow this mirror to be directed in a way that sunlight will be reflected towards a given location on the planet. This being the case, Ben Nowack, the founder, and CEO of the company have the intention of making this process as easy as possible. This is preceded by the fact that a user can log into a website and enter their GPS coordinates, and then be given some light after dark.
It was a fairly hopeful exhibit even with some difficulties evident according to the scholars of the field.
However, the picture depicted above as the future state is not perfect. Nowack stressed that it was only a demonstration: “there is still a lot of work that needs to be done for the company”. In fact, Reflect Orbital has not even launched a single satellite to space. But this startup added that it intends to deploy its first very large deployable reflector in the next four or five months.
A promising future?
Nonetheless, the start-up has already begun grabbing attention given the challenges it is faced with. ‘We received 30 thousand requests for a light spot and it increases each second’ – Tristan Semmelhack, co-founder and CTO of Reflect Orbital. In Nowack’s Vice interview, the aim is to build an entire constellation of satellites and sell sunlight to thousands of solar farms at night.
There are still number of issues which needs to addressed, for instance, technical viability and implications on the environment. But Reflect Orbital has already shown that it knows how to grab people’s attention on the Internet and opens up exciting prospects for the development of solar energy.
