It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Reflect Orbital's fucking stupid giant mirror satellite, with absolutely NOTHING useful to offer, which will cause countless safety issues, ecological disasters, and destroy the night sky, is going to launch.
A bunch of astronomers and I have sent out a fact sheet about them to a bunch of journalists, but very few are going to write about this. So, let me try posting it all here.
Here's what I know about Reflect Orbital and all the downsides:
Reflect Orbital (RO) https://www.reflectorbital.com/ wants customers to pay them to reflect beams of sunlight down from
orbit. This is called “sunlight as a service.”
Their initial plan is for each beam to be several times as bright as the full moon and at least 5 km in diameter on the ground.
https://www.darkskyconsulting.com/blog/the-dangers-of-sunlight-as-a-service
Due to the high speed needed to orbit Earth, each satellite will shine on one point for only
a few minutes at most (Reflect Orbital says 4 minutes https://thetundradrums.com/reflect-orbital-order-sunlight/)
If the mirrors cannot be stowed between pointings every 4 minutes, they will sweep across the ground as they move between one target and the next.
At their proposed size, a single RO satellite is orders-of-magnitude too faint to power a solar panel on the ground, thus many would be required to power solar panels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkjyeI0ykGM
RO has applied to the FCC for their first satellite launch in mid-2026, stating they plan to launch thousands of these satellites https://orbitaltoday.com/2025/07/31/startup-plans-to-beam-sunlight-to-earth-using-space-mirrors/
The costs to safety and human health:
Although the ground illumination from the first satellite will be much fainter than the Sun’s, looking at the satellite with binoculars or a telescope could actually damage your eyes, similar to looking at a partial solar eclipse. https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2000JRASC..94..237L
Having thousands of RO satellites in orbit would lead to frequent bright flashes all over the sky for any observer on the ground. Even millisecond flashes of light at night have been shown to disrupt human circadian rhythms. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0022078
Exposure to artificial light at night is linked to increased risks of some types of cancer. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5454613/
Ocular light sensitivity is the primary mechanism by which the central circadian clock, located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), remains synchronized with the external geophysical day. This process is dependent on both the intensity and timing of the light exposure. Little is known about the impact of the duration of light exposure on the synchronization process in humans. In vitro and behavioral data, however, indicate the circadian clock in rodents can respond to sequences of millisecond light flashes. In a cross-over design, we tested the capacity of humans (n = 7) to respond to a sequence of 60 2-msec pulses of moderately bright light (473 lux) given over an hour during the night. Compared to a control dark exposure, after which there was a 3.5±7.3 min circadian phase delay, the millisecond light flashes delayed the circadian clock by 45±13 min (p<0.01). These light flashes also concomitantly increased subjective and objective alertness while suppressing delta and sigma activity (p<0.05) in the electroencephalogram (EEG). Our data indicate that phase shifting of the human circadian clock and immediate alerting effects can be observed in response to brief flashes of light. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that the circadian system can temporally integrate extraordinarily brief light exposures.
The costs to astronomy:
Have you noticed how bright the sky is the last few nights with the very bright nearly-full moon? Now imagine a point source 4x brighter, and moving across the sky. That's what they want to do
Astronomy requires dark skies to see faint celestial objects. Due to scattering of light along the beam, anytime an RO satellite is above the horizon, it would disrupt any
ground-based optical astronomy telescopes in the area. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/smallsat/2025/all2025/98/
We are in the process of developing a system which redirects the incoming sunlight to a stationary ground target after sunset and before sunrise. One of the purposes is to extend operating hours of solar-farms to after sunset and before sunrise. Our system contributes to light pollution as a by-product. We have developed an optical model to predict the night sky glow caused by the light coming from an orbital reflector. In this paper we will review some work done by others on the night sky brightness caused by artificial city lights first, then present our results of model predictions on light pollution caused by orbital reflectors, and show how they compare with natural night sky background, measured full-moon night sky brightness, and some data measured for locations near a city or a campus.
Similar to astronomical observing with a full moon in the sky, it would restrict observations to only the very brightest handful of stars and planets. This would cause the vast majority of astronomy research to be impossible while one or more of these satellites is above the horizon.
Directly shining the beam onto a large telescope (anywhere within 5km of a large telescope facility) could damage sensitive research telescope camera equipment, which are calibrated to study faint celestial objects
The costs to ecology:
These are too numerous to even try to list.
All life on Earth – including humans, migrating birds, pollinating insects, plankton in the oceans – depends on the natural day-night cycle of light and darkness. Many hundreds of scientific studies document the importance to ecosystems and agricultural crops of protecting that natural cycle. Bird migrations, pollination, plant growth, and animal behaviors could all be disrupted by reflected sunlight from orbit.
The costs to orbital safety:
“Sunlight as a service” requires huge mirrors in orbit, which would increase the likelihood of collisions between satellites.
Loss of control could lead to tumbling, causing erratic, bright flashes in the sky.
There are already solutions right here on Earth to many of the problems “sunlight as a service” purports to solve. This approach is simply a reckless and inefficient use of Earth orbit, a precious and finite resource.
This list of facts was developed by me and a bunch of very concerned astronomers. If you're a journalist interested in writing a news article about this, please look up my university email and contact me, and I'll be happy to chat.
What can you do? The FCC never opened up a comment period on RO's filing for launch, so there's no official way to protest. They may open it up later? Absolutely no info on that.
DarkSky International is working on a petition to be delivered to RO's misguided investors, I will share that as soon as its public.
Most important: tell people about all the downsides of "sunlight as a service." The world needs to know how incredibly bad this idea is.
Batteries! We need batteries, not space mirrors.
Billionaires are out of their minds. We need a shitload of high-powered short burst capacitor series laser guillotines.
(I'm thinking ahead here).
@sundogplanets surely if any other country that isn’t the one which allowed it to happen has a problem, they could take it out with a missile?
It’s a private company’s property, so it’s not state vs. state violence and therefore couldn’t be seen as an act of war, only an act of self-preservation.
Reflect Orbital allows rich people to pay a lot of money to annoy their entire neighborhood for a couple of minutes to show off how rich and important they are.
Honestly speaking, I can hardly think of a better business case.
Well, the Musk's and Bezos' of the world wouldn't bat an eyelash at the finances and might find it fun to have a beam hit their precious backyard pools at midnight. For shits and giggles. @sundogplanets
I can't even wrap my head around why somebody would want to do this as a service. (I don't need you to write out an explanation; I don't want to take up your time that way. I will look it up.)
I think this is one of the stupidest things I have seen proposed recently. Next thing you know we'll have LED billboards in space or... whatever.
That's not the future I want! I want dark nights and to be able to see the Milky Way from my house, and for birds not to get lost in their migration paths and healthier sleep and... I guess I want to time travel back to the 1200s, when there were no satellites and no electric lights. Grrrr.
That is... yeah, that's a ridiculous idea. Bezos said it? How can these people be that disconnected from reality and our planet?
@arisummerland @sundogplanets
Yes, he said it.
https://www.geekwire.com/2025/jeff-bezos-orbital-data-centers-next-step/
I want to rant but I don't know where to start.
@arisummerland @sundogplanets Firstly, I believe they were villains from the start because no decent person would be able to hoard that much money.
Secondly, there is an interesting heiress in Austria, Marlene Engelhorn, who gave away her money. She claimed that money (and power) are addictions. And I am totally convinced. The billionaires all behave like addicts: More of the drug, any way possible, completely disregarding the hurt they cause.
@arisummerland
> this is one of the stupidest things I have seen proposed recently. Next thing you know we'll have LED billboards in space or... whatever
This! Sunlight-as-a-Service is like something out of Idiocracy. What's shocking is not that one nutter envisioned it (some of the blue skies brainfarts I come up with are just as far out), nor that a subculture of true believers formed around it. But that people in control of serious resources took it seriously.
That says a lot about the people in control of the resources -- meaning it says a lot about how out of touch they are with reality, at least in my mind.
Having read a little bit about it now, I sort of understand why somebody might think it would work and why they might think it might replace coal or natural gas or whatever to keep lighting up the world (and I continue to think it is a ludicrous concept). Yet it's still the space equivalent of filling up your entire yard with fragile tchotchkes that you're probably going to run over with your lawnmower. Bad idea.
@sundogplanets
Yes, please share the petition when it becomes available.
Thank you.
@sundogplanets Tech is becoming so trumpian. It's throwing up shit at us so fast we don't have time to stop one mess before the next one already swamps us.
Utterly atrocious. I didn't even know this was planned.
Will 'other' countries - adversely affected, and opposed to these devices, take the opportunity to shoot them down as a threat?
@sundogplanets This sounds like my father’s novel: Mirrors of the Apocalyse.
https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2023/08/mirrors-of-the-apocalypse-by-donald-l-moore-book-review/
@sundogplanets This is a fucking stupid idea. Messing with ecologies like that is extremely damaging.
Fuck this timeline.
@sundogplanets Can you imagine how many people's eyes will be damaged by accidental entry into the field of view of an amateur telescope? I had to blink away for several minutes seeing the full moon through my 30 cm telescope while I was "space walking" with a slow slew speed and a one degree field of view. I can't imagine a near point source 4x brighter. Actually, it would be similar to seeing a bit of the sun through the telescope. Very dangerous.
This is insane.
How is that even an FCC issue?
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