this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
238 points (100.0% liked)
Not The Onion
21941 readers
1075 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
“C’mon baby, just the tip…”
We live in the stupidest timeline.
It's more of a "sure, you can waste money on that" sort of approval.
People don't really understand the scale of what's needed to actually put large structures in space. Or in this case 50,000 satellites.
The plan is horrifically bad, but also completely unfeasible.
The FCC shouldn't be enabling this scam, but I'm not that worried.
Or no more worried about this scam than any of the dozen of active scams by semi-competent tech bro billionaires.
It's not horribly large, really. It's a super thin reflective film that unfolds.
It does seem like it would need way too many in the sky to be financially viable. Like, the cost would be much more prohibitive than paying for land and probably like 15% more solar panels to get the equivalent amount of solar electricity. Not to mention the global warming of 50,000 of these to be directing 3 mile areas of extra sunlight.
I say let them build and launch one to see what it can do, but never let them stick up 50,000.
This is a wild take.
Space mirrors are not a new idea, they're a very old one, a staple of sci-fi only now being tested in reality.
They stated that this is a small scale demonstrator, just to test the technology. The goal would be to get some real world measurements and decide on whether it could be economical and realistic going forward.
What part of that is a scam? I would say it's perhaps overly optimistic, but it's a perfectly honest exploration of engineering.
Tbh it’s stupider than that. We’re breaking records here.