How a startup company plans to harness the power of the sun at night

A California-based start-up company known as Reflect Orbital is looking to harness the power of the sun, regardless of the time of day on Earth. The CEO of Reflect Orbital Ben Nowack posted a video on Thursday, Aug. 22, showing the company’s vision of what it hopes to be able to accomplish with a vast array of mirrored satellites in orbit.

Reflect Orbital’s plan is to send up a number of these mirrors piggybacking on other planned rocket launches. Once in orbit, these satellites would pinpoint the sun’s rays onto a precise location on Earth. Nowack said he wants to make as easy logging into a website and using GPS coordinates to pinpoint where exactly a user would want the sunlight to shine.

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“The beauty of space is you can put things up there and they stay up for a long time,” said Tristan Semmelhack, the CTO of Reflect. “You this thing up really high and suddenly you have global access to basically any location on Earth if you design it correctly, that’s what’s magical.”

Nowack believes that the technology may one day be used to power solar farms at night. Reflect Orbital plans to launch what it calls its first “deployable reflector” in the coming months.

Reflect Orbital currently has its website focused on both lighting and energy. Lighting portion of the company focuses on bringing a “spot of sunlight” to a particular location on Earth after dark while the energy portion focuses on bringing the sun’s energy to a solar plant at night.