Shiny Happy Mirrors In Outer Space

IF YOU’RE HOPING FOR JOB at Reflect Orbital, you might want to practice your origami. The company’s success hangs on its ability to unfurl a mirror the size of a volleyball court from a satellite smaller than a mini fridge.

So it’s no surprise that Reflect’s founders, Ben Nowack and Tristan Semmelhack, used to test prospective candidates by watching them fold a paper crane. “The best crane test people were unbelievably good fabricators,“ says Semmelhack, the chief product officer.

It’s late August, and he and Nowack, the CEO, are giving me a tour of their new headquarters in Hawthorne, California in advance of their first satellite launch. After four years of trial-and-error, they are waiting for their number to come up on a Falcon 9 rideshare in order to test their audacious thesis: that they can make money by selling sunlight to parts of the world that don’t have enough it or, at the very least, don’t have it when they need it.

Both men are in their twenties, with an easy rapport. Nowack is clean-shaven and chiseled from sessions at the climbing gym. Semmelhack is long-haired and dreamy-eyed, squeezing a green stress ball as he talks. “I always have something I’m fiddling with,” he says. “I like physical reality.”

Relics from the young company’s early days have now been turned into modernist wall art, including a couple cranes and a series of reflector prototypes that were too complicated or too expensive. One reflector was made of hundreds of fabric tiles painstakingly stitched together. “Thank God, we ditched that,” says Semmelhack. Nowack, who came up with the idea, nods in agreement. “Like, obviously, nobody’s going to ever fund that,” he says.