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from the It's-a-bird,-it's-a-plane,-it's-an...art-object? dept.
Less than a year after "Humanity's Star" was launched by Rocket Lab and destroyed in Earth's atmosphere, another art project aims to place a highly reflective object in the night sky:
Now, nearly 50 years [after the Apollo 12 mission], artist Trevor Paglen hopes to draw the public's eye back to the sky with "Orbital Reflector," a sculpture made of shiny material much like Mylar that will reflect the Sun's light while orbiting the Earth. The sculpture, contained in a small structure called a CubeSat, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, in mid-November. When it enters orbit about 350 miles away from Earth, the sculpture will detach and inflate to its full shape, a diamond that may shine as bright as a star in the Big Dipper. After about two months, it will re-enter Earth's atmosphere and disintegrate.
By sending an object with no military value into space, Paglen said he hopes to raise a conversation about who is allowed to operate past Earth's atmosphere. As artists and historians praise his effort as boundary-breaking, some people within scientific communities are saying it lacks a practical purpose.
Paglen, a 2017 MacArthur fellow, has long been preoccupied with the less-visible, or deliberately hidden, infrastructures that make up the world. For years, he tracked the movements of more than 180 classified U.S. military spy satellites, measuring and photographing their locations for his project "The Other Night Sky."
[...] The project has drawn some criticism and confusion from scientists who question the value of adding what they see as impractical items to Earth's orbit. "It's the space equivalent of someone putting a neon advertising billboard right outside your bedroom window," Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Gizmodo. [...] Paglen responded to criticisms in August in a Medium post titled "Let's Get Pissed Off About Orbital Reflector...," saying he hoped to provoke productive conversations.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday September 26 2018, @10:04AM (5 children)
I always thought the biggest issue with the space-solar reflectors is human/political. Who will have control over what would essentially be to humans what the magnifying glass is to ants?
In the wrong hands such a device would be one serious weapon, and knowing human nature, someone would try to turn it into one. Assuming of course there isn't an error or failure in the safety systems and it all turns into one big accident.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 26 2018, @11:01AM (4 children)
I reckon the biggest issues are going to be engineering/safety in nature.
To worth it, the mirror has to be fucking big - some hundred of MW at least to worth the trouble of deploying something on geosync and then take the trouble to keep it stable (will look and behave like a solar sail).
At the level of energy fluxes in the latest 20 km of the path until it hits the receptors/converters, I have this nasty feeling the atmosphere isn't going to be a steady optical medium in which the rays propagate in straight predictable lines. Heating the air intensely (we talking hundred of MW, right?) is bound to create some spectacular tornado-like phenomena [youtube.com]
Heh, try to fry some ants able to launch some shiny reflective rockets and your magnifying glass is gonna last as long as the transit time of them rockets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 26 2018, @12:50PM (2 children)
Once the engineering/safety issues are overcome, it will become a political issue.
I have greater confidence in our increasing engineering abilities to deal with such problems than I do our apparently stagnant/oscillating political progress.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:33PM (1 child)
It may not worth it based on building and maintenance costs.
That is, it may only worth it as a military gizmo, but given the difficulty to defend and the maintenance cost is going to be a self-defeating strategy to have one: your enemy just needs to wait for you to run out of money. If you attack, the enemy needs to last some hours for the rockets in transit to blow it in pieces - not very hard in underground shelters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 26 2018, @06:36PM
With 8 billion people on the planet, we have already activated a doomsday device which will be fiendishly difficult to defuse. Global Thermonuclear war could seal our fate in 100 hours, but simple overpopulation seems sure to do us in with less than 100 years.
I don't really care who gets the scraps after either, it will be thousands, perhaps millions of years before anything resembling today's fun returns to the world.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @12:24AM
You're thinking in terms of nations and militaries.
Think in terms of "Joe, disgruntled power-station employee" and "Joe's boss's flammable house in the suburbs".