No but I uh understand the human English language and you mean to imply that is what I am suggesting

You might want to study the English language a bit more. Maybe some history too. The revolutionary US is often held up as an attempt to build a classless society, in contrast to Europe's aristocracy. That's not entirely accurate, the US founders had a bunch of different ideas about classism, and, uh, there's slavery of course, but people like John Adams purposely tried to structure the new government to prevent the class tyranny that the old aristocratic systems suffered from.

TLDR: I was agreeing with you.

The military implications are obvious. Think Ukraine. If you suspect the enemy is trying to infiltrate on a dark night along several kilometers of frontline, you light up the scene while launching a bunch of low-cost FPV drones, and those infiltrators are about to have a bad day.

You *can* spot infiltrators in the dark with IR cameras, but it requires much more expensive drones and isn't usually as effective, hence the preference for night operations. Plus, there's IR camouflage, with varying degrees of success. But it usually makes you stand out like a sore thumb under illumination (you're basically wearing a tent).

It's even funnier when you know that the Russians did the same thing in the 90s.

This is a demonstration. 60 feet is pretty modest, the Russians did 20 m in the 90s and planned 60 m. These guys are aiming for 180 ft (~60 m). Even that is fairly modest by what you could potentially do. The US has 100 m dish antennas in orbit.

Little late for that. Like 35 years late.

The booster doesn't go to the moon anyway.

You make a question answering web service and then people pay you to have it answer their questions. How unfair. Oh the humanity.

This is a small prototype, not a full-scale mirror.

Also, ignoring that, pretending light brighter than the full moon is useless is... silly? For generating power, sure, but for illumination, it absolutely is not.

Did I say you did?

The ESA even famously poo-poo'd the idea, exactly like you guys are doing here.

Sure, and SpaceX is going to cure cancer and let us all live forever for free. The fact that they once did something that somebody somewhere thought they couldn't do doesn't mean they can automatically do anything. Note that SpaceX themselves say they don't really have any idea whether datacentres in space will work.

unlike you and apparently most others on slashdot, I'm not going to try to stop it,

I didn't say anything about stopping it. There are good arguments for proceeding carefully though. A million satellites in one of our most valuable orbits comes with a bunch of problems.

Besides, I'm not seeing the argument for fraud, which is what GP asserted

I didn't reply to the OP, I replied to you:

If that was the intent, it wouldn't really work due to Elon himself having more downside exposure than anybody,

Elon doesn't have any downside. He's never going to sell his shares unless he absolutely has to. He wants to go to Mars, which means SpaceX wants to go to Mars. SpaceX made $75 billion dollars off the IPO, possibly at quite an inflated price. He also gets his Twitter investors off his back as they can now cash out their formerly underwater shares at a significant gain.

Whether any of it is fraud or not is for lawyers to figure out. Every company is going to hype their stock before an IPO. SpaceX says, buried deep in the prospectus, that they really have no idea whether datacentres in space are going to work or not, and they have a few very compelling reasons to push highly speculative, AI-related ideas even if they don't think they're going to work.

Don't judge a book by it's cover. The "top" journals have always been mostly hype. Even more so now that they can charge $13,000 to publish an article in them.

Right. And Starfish Prime was launched into an orbit where it remained for days before it was detona....

Oh wait no, it was a regular old ICBM that was set to detonate early.

That's a very nice classless society you have there.

Coca-cola contains Kola nut extract.

Does it? You seem very sure considering the recipe is a famous secret. And the Internet disagrees:

https://www.bbc.com/future/art...

https://fox8.com/news/it-used-...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

Joe Consumer doesn't really care about disabling the LED on his funny glasses. Joe Creep does, and is pretty highly motivated to do so. He might not have the gumption to follow an Internet How-To that involves a soldering iron, but he's clearly got too much money and can pay someone like the shops mentioned in the summary to do it for him.