That's part of why experiments like this are done. Reflect Orbital would prefer that the spot be kept as tight as possible, they ultimately need to test out the technology to refine it.
Almost everyone in this thread seems to be jumping straight from "their first prototype was approved for testing" to "therefore every plan of theirs is about to be immediately implemented." And the dopamine that comes from the ensuing rage and fear is making it hard to accept otherwise, it'd kill the buzz.
Also it’s who gets to approve such a monstrous plan?
The FCC. It's in the title. There's more detail in the article if you want.
Surely not a national government as it is an international issue.
Satellites have always been regulated by the nation they're launched from or owned by. There are international treaties regulating some aspects of that, but treaties are implemented by their signatories - the national governments.
But they only have approval for one.
"Sunlight on demand" is an exaggeration. The plan is to create a 5km spot of 0.1 lux, which is a bit brighter than a full moon.
Every time I've seen this news posted (and I've seen it a lot over the past few days) everyone has leapt to some very extreme conclusions.
Back when generative image AIs first came into general awareness with Dalle-3 and Stable Diffusion and so forth, there was a fad of changing image alt text into deliberately misleading nonsense. Which, of course, was not great for the visually impaired back then either. It was ineffective and short lived, but it's still pretty annoying seeing people proudly declaring their intent to make things deliberately difficult for people who rely on technology for this kind of stuff. So IMO worth pointing out.
By "bad faith troll and AI evangelist" XLE means "someone I disagree with about this topic, and therefore that I follow around obsessively accusing of being a troll."
He's really rather sad that way, I notice that every thread I've been in over the past few days with any relation to AI he's been adding this comment to. Guess he noticed me again. At least he's stopped calling me a literal bot or accusing me of being "from Reddit" as if that meant something nefarious.
So evidently, people either can't tell when AI is being used or don't care when AI is being used.
Trump says he's going to tariff Canada to punish them for being on fire. So they're doing something to help.
Why would they spread the light evenly? They're planning on selling it. Someone would need to pay them to have a place illuminated, it's not going to be randomly beamed all over.