
Russian crowdfunded reflector satellite aims to be “brightest star in the sky” - chris-at
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/russian-crowdfunded-reflector-satellite-aims-to-be-brightest-star-in-the-sky/
======
DanBC
In the 1980s there was a proposal for something similar, a "light ring in
space" from Europe. That project was decorative, a pretty object to look at.

It was obviously a stupid idea and scientists did a good job of explaining
why.

[https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=i6PR8dMk1GUC&pg=PA60&lpg...](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=i6PR8dMk1GUC&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=european+satellite+project+reflective+ring&source=bl&ots=DIhVLIUydE&sig=3_JY39T4zy2WbY-
QuJGUvrcLi7U&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjt7Pq2uqTLAhVMDxoKHTluDQYQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=european%20satellite%20project%20reflective%20ring&f=false)

(For fuck's sake Google. Look at that stupid hideous URL.)

~~~
timthelion
"a sky filled with orbiting trademarks or political symbols. These billboards,
perpetually overhead, from which there would be no escape on earth."

~~~
adrianN
Just increase light pollution enough and the problem is solved :)

~~~
noazark
Lol, AdBlock Lux

~~~
kzhahou
Michael Herf should build a version of flux that actually changes the color of
the night sky, at night.

~~~
adrianN
Once enough people bought shitty hackable color-changing light bulbs...

------
aaron695
I guess the next step would be to crowdfund a rocket to remove this light
pollution/ad?

~~~
DanBC
Who'd risk Kessler Effect?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome)

~~~
elbigbad
This is beyond the scope of my knowledge so maybe it's a stupid question, but
why doesn't space debris deorbit on its own like anything else not in
geostationary orbit?

~~~
Zikes
From the wikipedia entry:

> Orbital decay is much slower at altitudes where atmospheric drag is
> insignificant. Slight atmospheric drag, lunar perturbation, and solar wind
> drag can gradually bring debris down to lower altitudes where fragments
> finally reenter, but this process can take millennia at very high altitudes.

------
timthelion
The idea expressed at the end of the article "orbiting mirrors could be used
to extend the length of daylight hours for harvests" actually sounds like it
could be very reasonable. Vertical farming and aquaponics is currently
restricted by light to a large extent. If this solves the lighting problem for
vertical farming, we could end up with a 10000 layer farm built into an old
mine quary that could feed a large country. And then all of that farm land
could be left to nature :) Deforestation could be reversed, and the reversal
of deforestation could play a key roll in reducing the roll of carbon
emissions...

~~~
reitzensteinm
I think you're vastly overestimating how much area would be available in a
farm built into an old quarry.

A 4km by 1km parcel of land is not large for farming. But put vertically, it
represents the biggest open cut mines ever made.

~~~
timthelion
So, working with 4Km2... There are 13 million square kilometers of arible land
on earth:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_land](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_land)
. If the virtical farm is strung up with 400 meters of 10cm layers, that makes
4000 layers. That would be 16 000 square kilometers of farming area, or a bit
over 0.1% of all arible land. I think that with modern vertical farming, using
a 24 hour year around light source, the farming surface can produce several
times the avarage arible land production. Lets say 4 times... That would make
almost 0.5% of the world farm production in just one tiny area. So it would
take just 200 such constructions to replace tradtional farming entirely...

~~~
o_s_m
You need arable soil for all 4000 layers. You will be taking valuable topsoil
from just as much land.

~~~
timthelion
That is not how aquaponics and vertical farming work. They use solulable
nutrients which are either gained through a nutrient cycle (the water flows
down to a pool which has fish in it), or via mining of otherwise hard to get
nutrients. Soil is not used. While the source of all these nutrients is a
problem, it is comparible to the huge quantities of petrolium based
fertilizers that we use today. It is bad, but what we have now is bad too...

~~~
saiya-jin
... so you are proposing a bad idea that seems pretty wrong from multiple
aspects. generally hydroponics is a sh __t cheap substitute for real growing
for those who cannot afford quality vegetables (sadly, I sometimes fall down
that hole too and then regret this decision while eating this tasteless cr*p
full of unhealthy chemistry).

no, thank you for many reasons

------
xlm1717
I hope this idea literally never gets off the ground. If one person/company
gets approval to go ahead, there will be no end to the people/companies
seeking approval, and there goes ground-based astronomy.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Yeah we don't need Russian "taste" in space. As someone who's traveled there,
they have very different ideas on whats socially acceptable. Big ads/lights in
the sky might be fine there, but certainly not everywhere. This is the kind of
thing we should all be fighting against, not encouraging with "me too" upvotes
on social media. This is simply space graffiti. The commercialization of space
should not mean the ad-ification of space.

As launch prices drop, I think we'll see more of these shenanigans. This
really should be stopped now.

~~~
scrupulusalbion
>This really should be stopped now.

Sure, stopping this instance is possibly worth the trouble, but what about
next time? Amateur satellites are already possible, thus the possibility of an
ever increasing occurrence of space graffiti.

The first issue is how one can stop space graffiti entirely. Should the UN get
involved? Should NATO get involved? In any case, it would either be a
statutory matter (pass a law against however-defined graffiti in space) or a
military matter (use generally expensive anti-satellite missiles or lasers).
The means to stop space graffiti seems to be rather expensive and politically
charged/dependent. (for reference, I am not assuming that you want to do
anything in particular, but I bring up criminalization of and shooting down
space graffiti just to get on with my point.)

The second issue is what harm is cause by space graffiti. Sure, unaware
astronomers would be at least annoyed. Do they deserve a natural night sky to
make their jobs easier? Space graffiti seems like art to me, but space debris
seems the more serious possible problem. Since this specific instance of space
graffiti seems to have planned for that, I think that harm is not a problem
herewith.

The third issue is whether anyone is obliged to not put astronomically
obnoxious objects in orbit around earth; is this the same kind of "don't do"
as assault or vandalism? If this specific instance of space graffiti were
launched without public awareness, then astronomers might find this space art
to be a problem, but I think that astronomers are probably watching news
outlets for these sort of launches. Anything on the other side of the space
graffiti is not un-see-able, but is that reason enough to either criminalize
or shoot down space graffiti. Does anyone deserve the night sky to contain
only natural light sources, but also a few super-useful objects (e.g. GPS
satellites)?

I bring all this up, because I hope to demonstrate that space graffiti, as
stupid as it may be, is a very limited problem. It seems that the stupidity
associated with a problem makes the problem seem bigger; ask anyone who has
seen prank videos on YouTube whether the government should try to stop pranks.
Graffiti on earth is often vandalism and art, yet nobody owns space so space
graffiti cannot be vandalism but is still some sort of art.

~~~
schoen
(Edit: my comment on space debris was completely redundant with something you
said elsewhere in your post!)

------
BenRRR
Would it be feasible to deploy massive solar sails to cast a shadow and
prevent solar heat from hitting the earth, so that over enough time it might
reverse some of the effects of global warming?

~~~
marcosdumay
Please, remember that we literally live on solar energy. That's what we eat.
And that's also the most promising alternative from the global warming causing
fossil fuels.

So, please, don't take the solar energy away.

~~~
bryondowd
Engineering aside, you could perhaps position this shadow strategically over
some place that is uninhabited and which wouldn't cause too much weirdness in
our climate. Or perhaps many small shadows. My guess would be that you would
want them over the oceans. Or maybe Kim Jong-un's house.

Alternatively, if geostationary is too high up, perhaps just wrap them at a
particular latitude near the equator, spaced out so they just make an effect
like a perpetually cloudy day. You then just have to keep your solar panels
and needy crops off that latitude.

~~~
marcosdumay
If you want a big enough effect to detail global warming, you'll need a big
enough effect to change the climate. There's no place it "wouldn't cause too
much weirdness in our climate".

If you place them over the equator, you've just destroyed the places with the
highest plant growing and solar energy harvesting potential. Granted it is not
the most used place of the world today, just the one with most potential.

If you place the shadows over the oceans, you'll completely change the
environment there, and help destroy its bigger species, that we eat too.

~~~
bryondowd
Well, the whole point is that the Earth, due to greenhouse effects, is taking
in too much sunlight compared to what it is radiating back out into space. So
yeah, you're going to be reducing the total potential harvestable sunlight
getting to Earth. However, that's not really a constraint for us at the
moment. We just care about tapping sunlight in places near where there is a
demand for energy. So, you could probably find a nice band around the Earth
where the inability to place highly efficient solar panels wouldn't be missed
sorely.

By 'too much weirdness' I'm referring to instigating entirely new and
dangerous weather patterns. Ideally, you could keep the weather roughly the
same, with the lowered temperatures disbursed enough to create a measurable
but not easily noticeable effect.

And we're also not talking about plunging the area into permanent darkness,
we're talking about enough reflection to reduce average global temperatures by
a few degrees (or at least prevent them from rising further). I expect that
could be done, if spread out enough, without enough of an impact on any one
area to impact local environments.

Of course, this is all just theoretical. I doubt it's actually a reasonable
course of action. I just don't think this is why it isn't.

------
d_theorist
This reminds me of a sci-fi book that I cannot remember the name of, in which
the Coca Cola company deliberately initiates the supernovae of 100+ stars in
order to spell out the message "COKE ADDS LIFE!" in the night sky.

~~~
gjm11
According to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_advertising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_advertising)
it was "a Red Dwarf novel". The page doesn't say which one, but a bit of
googling suggests it may have been _Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers_.

~~~
d_theorist
How embarrassing for me :)

For some reason I was half convinced it was HGTTG. Probably because I read
them at about the same time, when I was about 10.

------
blaze33
I stumbled upon this article the other day:
[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-man-who-turned-night-
in...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-man-who-turned-night-into-day)
it's about the previous Znamya experiments
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_%28satellite%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_%28satellite%29)

------
cbanek
Has anyone thought of the impact this might have on earth based observations?
We already have Iridium flares that happen from shiny satellite parts, and
these flares have disturbed observations from various observatories (and this
wasn't even intentional).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare)

------
floatrock
Technically, isn't the sun the "brightest star in the sky"?

~~~
mfoy_
Not at night!

------
fred_is_fred
The "Russian moon" has been an on again off again urban legend/hoax for
probably 50 years. Don't fall for it again.

------
mlonkibjuyhv
We need a kickstarter to bring this thing down if it's ever launched.

------
JoeAltmaier
With a solar cell and a tether, it could stay up forever?

------
fougerejo
But, why?

~~~
chippy
From the Russian site, googletranslated:

" This space satellite, which will be the brightest star in the night sky.
Star, which will remind the world who was the first in space and show that the
contribution to space exploration can contribute not only to the state and
corporations. "

~~~
johansch
I just puked.

Good thing this is a russian kickstarter thing - with 95% probability it is a
fraud.

------
jlebrech
so the first piece of ringworld?

