VALDOSTA – A city in China wants to launch an artificial moon into space to help save money with street lights.

City officials say they plan to launch this “moon” in 2020. The moon is basically a mirror that would reflect light onto the city eight times brighter than the moon.

The artificial moon would orbit 500 kilometers above the earth and would save around $174 million in electricity from streetlights.

This isn’t the first time this idea has been proposed.

According to NBC News, “In the 1920s, a German physicist named Hermann Oberth proposed the idea of using a space-based mirror to reflect light to Earth. Nothing came of that idea. But seven decades later, on Feb. 4, 1993, Russian cosmonauts released a small experimental mirror from the Mir space station, Bruce Hunt, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, told NBC News MACH in an email.”

There’s a lot of questions to this project. If there’s no dark at night, will people get mad and lose sleep? What will it do to wildlife? Will this “moon” burn out?

It sounds like a good idea to save money but only time will tell.