Demands on Sunlight
It's time for some silliness. At least I think it's silliness. Because if it isn't silliness it's a nightmare.
A flash in the pan
In the pre-dawn morning of February 4, 1999, a bright beam of light swept across Western Europe. Starting over the Atlantic, it swept France, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, and continued on up into Northeastern Russia, where the beam was finally drowned in the light of the rising Sun. The shining was about 5 km in diameter on the ground, the size of a small town, it was as bright as the Moon, and it traveled across the ground at around 8 km/second, or 17,895 miles/hour. Although the skies were generally cloudy that morning, the strange and startling brightness was reported by many, including by a German weather station, as the speeding flash strobed the Alps.
A meteor? A military test flight? Space aliens? No, that flash was the first successful use of a space mirror to reflect sunlight in quantity down to earth, banishing the dark. At least locally. At least temporarily. For half a second. The flash was the culmination of a long-standing Russian space experiment, named Znamya, or "Banner," designed to extend daylight working hours in Northern Siberia, with less Dickensian perks as ancillary benefits, such as a longer growing season.
Znamya was the brainchild of Vladimir Syromyadnikov, a superb Russian engineer who designed spacecraft docking mechanisms still used today. His first love was solar sails, the idea of using the pressure of sunlight to propel a spacecraft for "free" deep into space. I wrote some fiction about it here. No one was particularly excited about Vladimir's lightsails and so, instead, he cobbled together financial support from government agencies and private sources to form the Space Regatta Consortium (SRC), which would fund the Znamya solar reflector project.
Znamya 2 was a 20m (~65 foot) diameter thin film reflector, packaged up and shipped to the Russian Mir space station, where it was assembled onto a docked Progress spaceship. The spaceship was then scooted out, some distance from the Mir, and the mirror deployed. Everything worked according to spec. The spotlight banged across Europe and startled the lonely goatherd in the German Alps.
This proof of feasibility garnered the team considerable recognition and momentum. So they followed up with Znamya 2.5, a 25m (82 foot) diameter mirror upgrade with major new features. In particular, the attitude, the pointing, of the mirror would not be passive like it was in Znamya 2. Rather, the mirror was engineered so it could be aimed and actively pointed at a specific site on the ground for minutes at a time, instead of just flashing by at 17,895 mph. The spot would be bigger and brighter, too.
Things did not go well. Brian Merchant (now at Blood in the Machine) recounted the story in detail for the late technology site Motherboard (RIP). The New York Times reported at the time:
The Mir space station crew abandoned a failed experiment with a sun-reflecting mirror today -- a prototype officials had hoped would lead to larger models that could illuminate sun-starved northern cities and disaster areas.
The mirror was supposed to work like an artificial moon, reflecting a beam of sunlight across the earth. But a deployment mechanism jammed on Thursday, and scientists could not find a way to correct the problem.
So today, the Mir crew sent the mirror, attached to a cargo ship filled with trash, into the earth's atmosphere, where it burned up and dropped into the Pacific Ocean.
With that, backers bailed, money dried up, and the whole project was shelved. There is a legacy website for SRC that is still online (as of this writing) for those of you nostalgic for good-old Netscape era HTML designs.
Everything old is new again
Perhaps it was some disgruntled Gremlin fishing in the Pacific Ocean who dredged up a long lost, barnacle-encrusted shred of the Znamya thin-film, formerly known as "mirror". Perhaps it is just one of those ideas that is so bad it can't be killed. In any case, it's back. Like a bad penny. Like the cat on the very next day.
It's a US private company this time, called Reflect Orbital ("Sunlight on Demand"), backed by venture capital from the likes of Silicon Valley giant Sequoia Capital (think Apple, YouTube, NVIDIA, etc), Lux Capital ("We turn Sci-Fi into Sci-Fact"), and Starship Ventures ("We seek and empower the contrarians turning science fiction into reality"). Catchy.
Reflect Orbital numbers oscillate but their recent plans call for 4000 satellite mirrors in sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit to deliver "sunlight on demand." For what? Originally to extend sunlight for solar panel farms. More recently that has been expanded to include artificial light for promotional events (Great Gatsby parties, anyone?), search and rescue operations, military capabilities, urban energy and lighting, agriculture, and mining and manufacturing. The elevator pitch is pretty much the same one the Russians used for Znamya – Syromyadnikov would be flattered.
Announced in September, 2024, Reflect garnered $6.5 million in its seed round funding from Sequoia and Starship. That success led to a further $20 million in Series A venture capital investment announced in May of 2025. In the mean time, Reflect was successful with a submission for a government Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant of $1.25 million -- proposing on-demand sunlight for Air Force operations – a grant announced in June 2025.
The Znamya 2 experiment reportedly cost the SRC group roughly $10 million in the 1990s. That's about $28 million in today's currency, accounting for inflation, and so Reflect is more or less on schedule. So this is not a joke. It may be silly, but it is not a joke.
Reflect has conducted feasibility testing, Wizard-of-Oz style, from a balloon, and produced a video overture chronicling the event. Though, in my opinion, it is best watched with the sound off.
This was one of those tests that was "doomed to success," as we used to say in the lab. Floating around in a balloon and dangling a big mirror off the side cannot fail but to reflect sunlight, and with a truck load of solar panels to race around chasing the spot, the chances of filming the extinction of some photons on said panels, well, that approaches 100%.
I'm writing about Reflect Orbital here because they made a big splash in the tech news recently. With funding milestones in hand, they just requested a launch license to put a prototype mirror in space, as early as April 2026.
Znamya 2.5 here we come, at last.
Up next, the pitchforks are coming for Reflect Orbital. There have always been pitchforks.