Programming Sunlight: How Reflect Orbital Is Building Satellites to Redirect Light From Space (Ben Nowack, Founder & CEO)
Most energy conversations start with scarcity. This one starts with abundance. Sunlight powers nearly everything on Earth, directly or indirectly. And yet we have almost no control over when or where we get it. Ben Nowack thinks that’s a solvable problem. Ben is the founder and CEO of Reflect Orbital, a company building satellites designed to redirect sunlight from space—not as a thought experiment, but as a product. The company nearly died before it worked. Eight months in, Ben had $300 left and was living in a garage. He made a deliberate decision to go $50,000 into credit card debt to finish critical tests. At one point, he was down to $21 of available credit. A month later, Reflect raised its first round. Today, the company is preparing to launch its first revenue-generating satellites.
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- Uploaded May 26, 2026
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Speaker A: You are doing one of the boldest, weirdest, most interesting things in the world at the moment. What is it that you are trying to build? Speaker B: We are building the tools to control sunlight. So right now it's completely impossible to control the amount of sunlight you get at night. We are building a constellation of satellites to change that. You can use it to grow plants. You can use it to power on solar farms at night. Just an absolute ton of things. Speaker A: What are the pieces that you think folks tend to miss most about where this is headed?
Speaker B: You can just keep adding satellites together and keep increasing the power. You can have 4,000 satellites working together at one time. You get to have 10,000 satellites working together at one time. You don't You don't have to have the satellites talking to each other to do that. You just have them all pointing at the same spot at the same time. Speaker A: So I'm curious what it was that gave you the confidence and the agency to think, yeah, I'm the type of guy who might be able to figure out beaming sunlight from space down to Earth.
Speaker B: I would get obsessed with ideas like, this month I have to build an underwater vehicle, I'm going to figure out how to do it. And I just like did all these weird projects, like I made a jet boat. I just went kind of crazy. And that gave me a ton of confidence that I could do basically anything if I just tried hard enough. Speaker A: Here's a crazy idea. What if the solution to humanity's rising energy needs isn't nuclear fission, fusion, cheaper batteries, or geothermal, but massive, carefully engineered mirrors that bounce sunlight from space straight down to solar farms on Earth?
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