Chinese city wants to put ‘artificial moon’ in orbit to replace streetlights by 2020.

The city of Chengdu in southwest China has an ambitious plan to launch a fake moon into the sky that will illuminate the whole city. This ‘artificial moon’ will in fact be a satellite capable of generating a light that’s eight times brighter than the real moon and replacing the need for streetlights in the city. Wu Chunfeng is the chairman of a private space contractor called Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co. and a man dearly in need of a shorter company name. He explained to audience members gathered at an event in the city last week that satellite will be able to light an area with a diameter of 10 to 80 kilometres.

According to the Chinese news site People’s Daily Online (PDO), which covered the event, the fake moon could dial its illumination down to within a few dozen meters.  Apparently, testing has already started on the satellite and the plan is to launch it sometime in 2020. It’s not known whether or not this idea has the backing of either the city’s officials or the government of China. But then again, Mr’s Chunfeng’s company is the primary contractor for the country’s space program. Any concerns about light pollution or the disruption to nocturnal animals appeared to be quashed at the event. The PDO reports that Kang Weimin, the director of the Institute of Optics of the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, said the light emitted by the moon would only amount to a ‘dusk-like glow,’.

The site says that the idea for the artificial moon came from a French artist who imagined hanging a necklace made of mirrors above the earth, which would reflect sunshine through the streets of Paris all year round. No details have emerged about the size or the illumination technology of this moon – and it’s also not clear how the company plans to keep it overhead. At present, the only way to create a geosynchronous orbit is to put your satellite above the equator and have it match the rotation of the Earth. Chengdu is about 30 degrees north of the equator which will make things a bit challenging. Back in the 1990s a team of Russian scientists tried to do something similar with a space mirror.

‘The most ambitious proposal foresees a constellation of 100 reflectors, each 1,300 feet in diameter with a surface area of 30 acres,’ wrote the New York Times at the time.  if It was called the Znamya experiment and, although the tech was fairly sound, it never made it off the ground. It remains to be seen whether Chengdu’s artificial moon will prove any more successful.

Metro.