FCC Greenlights New Orbiting Mirrors That Could Disrupt Night Skies
(redstate.com)
These people are STUPID!
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The FCC is allowing ONE mirror satellite in low earth orbit as a test, but the company envisions thousands of them in the future if it is proven to work.
The Eärendil 60 foot diameter mirror will concentrate sunlight onto specific locations on Earth for the purpose of testing increased solar power generation. At night, it will appear as a very bright moving star, nearly equal to Venus in brightness and a little brighter than the International Space Station.
I suggest a duplicate technology be launched... a 60 foot diameter magnifying glass to be in a slightly lower Earth orbit than the mirror. Sunlight reflected by the mirror can go through the large magnifying glass... with the superheated light beam focused on the FCC headquarters who authorized the giant mirror in the first place.
Just my 2-cents.
For me, the link went to an article behind a paywall, so I will rely on your account. All the mirror can do is reflect an image of the sun. But, if we assume (extremely generously) that the mirror is only 100 km from any ground site, it will have an angular diameter about 1/52 of that of the Sun. Which means it will reflect only 1/2690th of the sun's area (about 0.037 percent). All that trouble to produce only a visual annoyance? (The f-number for such a system would be no better than f/5,555, so I don't see it as being much of a "concentrator".)
It's not even a new idea. Krafft Ehrike proposed "solettas", circa 1970, mirrors of MUCH greater size, stemming from Hermann Oberth's ideas of the 1920s. (Hard to find information on solettas. Here is a link to an abstract of one of Ehricke's papers on the subject: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0094576579900031). I was privileged to meet and chat with Ehricke several times in the 1970s. He was quite a rousing character. As a boy, I built plastic models of the things he was dreaming up when he was at Convair.
That's a nickle these days.
I round up for great ideas.....