Comment by ben_w
13 days ago
You know "for a fact" anything about a tech which is currently in the experimental stage (or even "press release before first experiment" stage), in a field which has a famously large gap between theory and practice, confidently enough to assert it will definitely not suffer from the problems that mean the large sheet materials we already launch to space (space-qualified PV arrays) are much heavier than bare cells?
> Conservation of Etendue,
Sounds like you think I have in mind something like an Archimedes' heat ray. I do not see anything close to that for the presented satellites.
I would aver that the presented design is so far from being useful that making it useful requires solving enough engineering challenges to also enable an Archimedes' heat ray; but again: what is actually shown is not that.
The numbers I see from Reflect Orbital suggest they have an expectation of the apparent brightness fluttering by 5x from internal motion of the reflector. At the scale involved, may be easier to consider the imperfections/ripple as behaving the same as if some of the specular reflection becomes diffuse reflection.
I know for a fact because I’ve dug deep into the field, colleagues work on it every day, and I’ve met and talked to the founders of Reflect, saw material samples of their mirror tech.
I’ve physically touched the materials being used for solar sails and the lightweight mirrors.
Unless you've also both massed the support structure (easy) and demonstrated that the support structure is sufficient in practice rather than theory (requires launching it), you're missing the point I was making by a mile.