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For astronomers, the sky isn’t exactly falling—yet the sky-high ambitions of tech companies seeking profits in Earth orbit and beyond are becoming too disruptive to ignore. SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service, built with thousands of telescope-photobombing satellites, is the poster child for this problematic trend, but it’s not alone. The latest start-up with brash out-of-this-world plans is Reflect Orbital, which has built a business case for beaming sunlight from orbit to power solar farms after dark. The company, based in Hawthorne, Calif., next to SpaceX’s former headquarters, recently sought a license from the Federal Communications Commission to launch its first satellite in 2026 and plans to put thousands more in orbit.
Maybe that could work. But experts have technological, environmental, and safety concerns. Marketed as “sunlight on demand,” Reflect Orbital’s high-frontier initiative is just one among many; other companies in the proliferating space industry want to launch space advertisements, human remains, and made-to-order artificial meteor showers. Such wide-ranging—and, to some, objectionable—projects are part of an ongoing shift from government-sponsored science or defense-focused missions to a new, commerce-dominated space era.
The satellite that Reflect Orbital aims to loft in 2026 is a test spacecraft dubbed EARENDIL-1—a Lord of the Rings–inspired name that, like many other tech companies and products that reference the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, would probably make the anti-industrial author roll in his grave.
Once the satellite reaches its approximately 600-kilometer-high orbit, it will deploy a giant 18-by-18-meter mirror to redirect sunlight down to targets on Earth. (The mirror’s area is twice the size of a volleyball court.) In addition to describing the solar-power-boosting benefit of the technology, the company’s website advertises other applications, too, such as “unforgettable” sunlit evenings at “entertainment venues, corporate events, and urban public spaces.” Reflect Orbital is financed by investors, including Sequoia Capital and the billionaire Baiju Bhatt, and is supported by a $1.25-million Small Business Innovation Research contract from the U.S. Air Force as well.
Reflect Orbital’s project comes with many engineering challenges, however. “It’s simple but not easy,” says Darren McKnight, a systems engineer and senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a spacecraft- and debris-tracking company based in Menlo Park, Calif. “People look at each individual technology and say, ‘See, it’s possible,’ but don’t put it all together.”
Overheating and station-keeping could be big problems for the sprawling, sunbathed satellite, as could the precise control required to pinpoint a reflected beam onto targets far below. The beam would also shed some of its energy in the atmosphere, with the potential for clouds and inclement weather to dramatically degrade its intensity. Overcoming these overlapping challenges would be a tall order, and the transmission losses alone could be astronomical across such vast distances, McKnight says. Reflect Orbital isn’t the first organization to attempt giant mirrors in space for the purpose of beaming sunlight onto Earth: Russian space agency scientists pursued and even launched a prototype spacecraft in the 1990s before ultimately abandoning the effort.
Reacting to the company’s announcements, a group of astronomers produced a fact sheet on October 6. It stated, “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.” In a statement to Scientific American, Reflect Orbital’s chief strategy officer Ally Stone said the company “is committed to protecting dark skies,” and that its first missions would involve “tightly controlled light spots steered well away from observatories and sensitive areas.”
If the company’s plans come to fruition, following its tests next year, it will begin launching more mirror-toting satellites, ultimately building a mega constellation of 4,000 by 2030. Each would be capable of casting a 5 km-wide beam about four times brighter than the full moon down to Earth. But atmospheric scattering would ensure that some light escapes each beam, says John Barentine, a Tucson, Ariz.–based astronomer and executive officer of Dark Sky Consulting, which advises companies and city officials on outdoor lighting use. “We’ve calculated that, even relatively far from the beam, the [satellites] would still have an apparent brightness that would make them among the brightest objects in the night sky,” he says.
Large numbers of satellites in low-Earth orbit are crucial to Reflect Orbital’s plans because a daisy-chain approach is required to consistently illuminate a target on the ground. A single satellite there could only beam sunlight to a surface target for some four minutes before flying out of range, whereupon another satellite would take over with its own beam. This process could continue for an hour or two during twilight and dawn. In addition to the potential effects on ground-based astronomical observatories, which already struggle to study the universe through existing levels of light pollution, Barentine fears the beaming could also have dire consequences for nocturnal wildlife—as well as the celestial views of everyday stargazers.
Besides Reflect Orbital’s planned fleet of satellites, he cites other companies’ bright spacecraft—not only SpaceX’s Starlink mega constellation, which now includes more than 8,000 among its ranks, but also Amazon’s growing Project Kuiper satellite fleet. Other problematic projects are AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird satellites and its BlueWalker 3 prototype, which Barentine and his colleagues have shown to be exceptionally bright.
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