Sometime in the next few months, a California startup plans to launch a satellite that unfolds a mirror the size of a small building and bounces sunlight down onto the dark side of the planet.
The idea is astonishing. It might also be a mistake we cannot easily undo.
The company is Reflect Orbital, and last week the Federal Communications Commission granted permission to test a satellite carrying an 18-meter-wide mirror, which the company says could light streets and charge solar farms at night.
The demo satellite, Eärendil-1, launches into low Earth orbit later this year and will cast a bright spot roughly three miles across, about the size of five Central Parks, onto the ground below.
The ambition is remarkable. A mirror in orbit, sold by the hour, delivering daylight to any patch of Earth on request. Reflect Orbital plans to sell that reflected sunlight for up to $5,000 an hour, pitching search-and-rescue crews and construction sites that no longer stop at dusk. A decade ago this was science fiction. Now it is licensed and heading for the launchpad.
Then the alarm sets in, because many people who study the sky think this is a genuinely bad idea. Scientists warned the beams could flash-blind airline pilots, disrupt astronomical research, and interfere with the circadian rhythms that govern sleep and hormones in animals and control growth in plants. Of the 1,800-plus comments the FCC received, most were negative.
The most unsettling part is how the approval sidestepped all of it. The FCC held that environmental concerns fall outside its remit and that space is not governed by Earth’s environmental laws.
The one agency with the power to say yes decided the consequences were not its department. Reflect Orbital has not released the detailed specs a full risk analysis would require.
A little strange for October
The darker corner of our shop, open for the season.
And the test is only the start. If it works, the company hopes to launch 1,000 mirror satellites by the end of 2028 and 50,000 by 2035, the largest reflecting the light of 100 full moons. Even one beam would look four times brighter than a full moon to anyone inside it, according to the European Southern Observatory. Multiply that across tens of thousands, and a truly dark night starts to feel endangered.
There is an irony in the green framing, too. The company sells clean energy on demand, but that pitch skips the rocket fuel burned to reach orbit, which alone accounts for nearly half the climate impact of the space sector.
Night is one of the last things every creature on Earth still shares. It is thrilling that we can now switch it off from orbit. The harder question, the one the approval never really asked, is whether we should.
Top image by NASA
