Seeing a meteor shower is an incredible thing but what if you live in a city and so don’t get to see them often? Not a problem. Now it is possible to buy the opportunity. A Japanese startup called ALE is almost ready to launch their incredible meteor shower shows. A few years ago, we never could have imagined that we could buy something so natural as this, but today everything can be reproduced and sold almost exactly the same as it would normally be.
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A satellite that could create 30 meteor showers
The creators want to create a real-life show with false meteors in the sky above Hiroshima in the spring of 2020. Their goal is to make people forget all about the atomic bombings of the island, and only remember the shining, sparkling stars. For this project to be possible, the two developers created two microsatellites which will be able to, once in the air, release small shining balls. These balls would then disintegrate into many pieces which from Earth, would look like shooting stars in the sky. The first satellites are set to be sent to space in 2019, each equipped with 400 balls that could create around 30 meteor showers. This show in Hiroshima is certainly a symbolic moment for science but will also allow creators to make them more common, especially where they are less likely to be seen or not as frequent. Being able to make meteor showers on command is still crazy but Lena Okjima, CEO of the company, wants to make these meteor showers available all over the world.
‘We are targeting the whole world, as our stockpile of shooting stars will be in space and can be delivered across the world.’ It’s a bit like Uber for stars, but we’re still not sure that ordering stars would be as easy as ordering from UberEats!
