FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK NOOOOO
@sundogplanets Ah, for a quick Greenland defrost?
And the billionaires push the Earth closer and closer to Trantor.
@sundogplanets This was done before. Suggest you watch the documentary "Die Another Day". Some north korean launched it and when the Americans sent missiles to destroy it, he just aimed his mirror at the missiles and fried them.
The mirror was demoed at some ice castle in Iceland when he benevolently lit up just the castle at night to impress the guests, but then focused mirror to try to fry some british spy out to disable mirror.
Curiious which international body could stop this.
@sundogplanets can I just beat the unholy ribbons and bows out of today? I am so tired.
@sundogplanets turns out a great way to get billionaires sold on renewables is to add a novel source of global warming to the proposition
@sundogplanets I saw this in Die Another Day.
@sundogplanets This is really bad, but I also can't wait for some kid to log in to their system with default admin credentials & vaporize the white house or something with the unmatched power of the sun & continue doing so until the mirror satellites are made illegal, globally, forever.
@sundogplanets We really need the model rocket nerds to start getting into modeling anti-satellite missiles.
@sundogplanets what a bullshit cop out... It falls out of our purview. Time to take a little wider scope assholes
Want some reminders of how fucking terrible this idea is?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/true-cost-solar-power-night-reflect-orbital/
https://darksky.org/news/organizational-statement-reflect-orbital/
Journalists: please write about how dangerous this is.
Lawyers (especially if you're based in the US): please help fight this, it will take legal action now
@sundogplanets @NunavutBirder It is a truly asinine idea.
@sundogplanets
Many animals especially birds and bats.
Crops
and heat to warm the planet. Ugh.
@sundogplanets, if it works, yes, we want it - focused very tightly on, in some suitable order, the locations of that company and its owners. Make them nice and crispy.
We can see where this is going, a few investors spend a ton of cash establishing a paper value for the company, Issue an IPO and recover twice, or much more, their investment, and then wait for the company to go bankrupt.
In the universe of stupid, this has to be in the top three .. ever.
The only saving grace is that in my gut, I don’t believe it’ll actually work as planned. Hopefully that will be evident with just this first, trial, satellite and they will scrap the whole thing.
Bah.
@sundogplanets What about, say, nighttime, and animals & plants that require darkness to thrive? Or mirrors accidentally flashing or burning with that reflected sunlight? And all those satellites? Fck, this is really basic, simple stuff to consider.
@sundogplanets
Thats the plot to a crap bond movie.
@sundogplanets The other problem is that, for this to work at all, you might need a heliostationary orbit, creating kind of a traffic jam over the poles.
Think Kessler syndrome on steroids.
@sundogplanets I've always had a bad feeling about this idea, but I just tried to sketch out how it could work.
If the satellites are at 625km, that's only a tenth of the radius of the earth. Doesn't that mean the time they'll be in the sun and their target won't is very short? And probably at a very low angle of incidence? I think this means that you'd need hundreds for each target to get anything like steady illumination, particularly at midnight.
And even if they could perfectly reflect the power to earth, it can never be more than the sun's flux on the mirror, which is only 2,290sqm (for their bigger mirrors). The cost of a second 2,290 solar array and a battery to get you through the night is going to many magnitudes less than launching hundreds of complex satellite mirrors into orbit.
So what about illumination, their other "product"? I can't see anyone paying for hundreds of satellites when $5 LED head torches are right there. Even if they could illuminate an entire city (limited flux on the mirror makes that impossible), a city's street lighting system will still be magnitudes less expensive.
All of which convinces me that this will never happen. They may dupe enough investors to launch a test satellite, but the company will go bust five minutes after they release the actual performance stats. At the end of the day, Reflect Orbital is a scam on people who flunked science in school.
@sundogplanets What a dangerous and stupid idea. We humans seem to be hell-bent on becoming extinct!
@sundogplanets
Paging @heiseonline @mho - did you report on that lately?
@sundogplanets where's the problem?
There'll be another startup that'll bring thousands satellites that can bring shadow on earth wherever you want
Obviously you'll have to pay for that
And soon there'll such garbage in the sky that there'll be no more sky, sun, stars
Capitalists with no restraints' dream is a nightmare, it seems, the sooner they'll be stopped the better is
GREAT guess I'm not going to sleep tonight either. Maybe there will be auroras. I need to enjoy the night sky as much as I can now, I guess.
Fuck you, FCC, for approving this. Fuck Reflect Orbital and all the copycats it's going to spawn. Fuck techbros everywhere. Fuck venture capitalists for funding this destructive, useless bullshit.
@sundogplanets At least the internet provider constellations give humanity something. This is only good at identifying people who can't do math
Yet another article submitted for The Conversation, with some last minute modifications to express how fucking terrible the FCC's decision on Reflect Orbital is, which fit in perfectly with the overall theme of the article.
(How many articles in The Conversation is too many? I think this is my 5th this year. Every single one about different aspects of how techbros are destroying things in orbit)
I just reached out to a bunch of journalists who already wrote about how awful Reflect Orbital is. I hope at least some of them will write more about it.
(Please DM me if you have suggestions for journalists I should reach out to who might be interested in writing about this to a large audience)
@sundogplanets @hankgreen.bsky.social maybe??
@sundogplanets It's a bit out of her usual path, but if you catch Lindsay Beyerstein's attention you are assured of a good story: https://www.hillmanfoundation.org/lindsay-beyerstein
Do you know Prof. Harald Lesch?
Among other things, he is an astronomer and science journalist, and he hosts several popular science TV shows here on German television.
https://usm.uni-muenchen.de/people/lesch/lesch.html
RE: https://beige.party/@adub/116896129245194088
Oh fantastic, the FCC approved Reflect Orbital on Matariki. Just to make it more hideously disrespectful to absolutely everything.
Relatedly, I got interviewed months ago as one of 3 experts for this Aotearoa-based podcast that just came out, which talks about Matariki, access to the sky, and how bad the situation is in orbit: https://linktr.ee/kpcnz
A New York Times journalist just interviewed me about Reflect Orbital! And I've got an interview for Scientific American set up for Monday. Excellent.
Reflect Orbital is going to launch a giant fucking mirror into orbit.
SpaceX has asked to launch a million gigantic fucking orbital data centers, and they've already got 11,000 sats in orbit.
The UN website that allows everyone to see what new satellites have been launched has not been updated since February. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vqtp5dj2o6rqnge56sz2db5a/post/3mq7fzllgw22h
And tomorrow, we're going to run out of satellite catalogue numbers, Y2K in orbit: https://celestrak.org/
Time to go for a walk in the woods...
@sundogplanets It seems that the USA Department of Defense is looking at getting orbital power satellites, also. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/07/why-dod-silicon-valley-now-are-betting-on-solar-power-beaming-sats/
Well, I thought this was getting published next week, but it's out now!
Come read about Weird Space Stuff, sponsored by Reflect Orbital and the FCC (who both suck massively)
@sundogplanets um. These fucking idiots. Someone ought to check the output of solar panels in moonlight before they start dicking around with this. 😣
@sundogplanets This is not the solar powered future I asked for
@sundogplanets Why stop there? A LEO Constellation that sends soundwaves back to Earth of Lee Greenwood's "I'm Proud to Be An American" 24/7 over the Continental United States so you can't avoid patriotism.
@sundogplanets Thank you for your passionate advocacy and education on all this, Professor. 🙏🏻✨
@sundogplanets I mean, the question is How are we going to take it DOWN when the time has come?
@sundogplanets
We presume that new satellites will use identifiers that follow the Orbit Mean-Elements Message (OMM) spec., of the form YYYY-NNNP{PP}, that provide a much larger range of values.
And TLEs will be replaced by OMMs.
https://celestrak.org/NORAD/documentation/gp-data-formats.php
https://ccsds.org/Pubs/502x0b3e1.pdf
@AkaSci Yes. And major operators have probably updated to the new format. It's probably fine... probably...
@sundogplanets
Looks like even older satellites have been assigned the new format OBJECT_ID aka International Code.
E.g., Starlink-1269 launched in 2020 has ID 2020-012V.
"The earth is spent! Time to screw up the space around it"
@sundogplanets just had a flash of China shooting it all down
@sundogplanets Don't scare the goats while you scream. It's hybris.
I have seen some of these tech waves, but not one with this much possibe impact on the whole eart and economy. Combination of AI and space seems to be toxic.
@sundogplanets You are astronomy’s hero rn.
This is excellent news!
@sundogplanets
NYT: what do you think about Reflect Orbital?
Prof. Lawler: 💩
My prediction.
@flipper I said it with more scientific backing, but yes.
@sundogplanets Go Get ‘em GRRRRRRRRL!!
@sundogplanets YES! I suggest you offer opinion pieces there, WSJ, USA Today, etc.
@sundogplanets not to mention adding more energy to an overheating atmosphere. Homo “sapiens”? I think not.
@sundogplanets At least SpaceX shares are at record lows.
When it's this important, it can never be too many!
@sundogplanets are we getting zapped by a space laser yes or no. Percentage possibility would be welcome also
@sundogplanets You forgot: fuck Capitalism in general!
Maybe Kessler Syndrome isn't the worst outcome...
@sundogplanets is there a way to block this from the scientific community even if it was approved by FCC?
@alien @sundogplanets I think the FAA will have a thing or two to say about it, especially wrt flash blinding pilots.
@sundogplanets Ok, stage #2.
Someone, definitely not you, needs to find out which vc /banks are funding this, and which insurer is planning to underwrite the launch.
Cause them enough pain to drop any connection with this abomination.
More broadly, if the FCC is arguing it is not competent to be the regulator, fine, let ESA start pressure for the UN to take over that role.
@sundogplanets Honestly I hope someone boycott this before it happens.
#directaction
Just gotta say, even to all the pacifists and myself, humans throughout history have waged war over less.
Not saying it is a good idea, just making another observation while the planet and humanity along with it suffers so assholes can make us subservient.
@sundogplanets I'm so sorry, that's terrible news 🙁
@sundogplanets I just hope some folks hack it and deorbit it!
@sundogplanets [REDACTED] all the people who sponsored this shit.
@sundogplanets Modest Proposal: we get the best Irish scientists together to create a spud cannon capable of hitting objects in low earth orbit and then fire it directly into everyone responsible.
Preferably all standing in a straight line so we don't have to waste a lot of good potatoes.
@sundogplanets it's about as brilliant as getting the first man on the sun ... at night
