Ground-based astronomy is already fighting for its life against massive satellite constellations like Starlink. If we start launching tens of thousands of literal mirrors into orbit to artificially brighten the night sky, we are going to permanently ruin our ability to observe deep space from Earth
"According to the site, the company plans on deploying two satellites by the end of 2026 that will be able to reflect light at 0.1 lux — or as they say, “comparable to a full moon” — for five minutes.
By 2027, they predict they will have 36 satellites in orbit that are capable of reflecting light at 2 lux for 2.5 hours, which Reflect Orbital says is comparable to street lighting.
Fast forward to 2035, and the firm wants to have more than 50,000 satellites orbiting Earth that are capable of reflecting enough light to mimic daytime for hours. They say the satellites could also operate at 100 lux — comparable to indoor work areas — for 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
Luckily there's already been push back.
"According to the documents, several entities were against the license approval for a number of reasons, such as radio frequency interference and space debris mitigation. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, “a flood of opposition” came in from astronomers and wildlife experts, among others, who said that the light from the mirrors could “distract airplane pilots, wreak havoc on astronomical observations and interfere with circadian rhythms — the light-and-dark cycles that help people function, animals and plants know when to wake and sleep, to bloom or to migrate.”
Unfortunately the Feds decided it would be fine.
"We therefore disagree with assertions that ReflectOrbital has not demonstrated its proposed operations are in the public interest,” the FCC license reads. “To the contrary, it is in the public interest to make spectrum available to encourage companies to test new and innovative space activities, as it promotes American innovation and the new services and economic growth that come from that innovation.”
Sure, but think of the profits. Billionaires could have a subscription model to charge entire countries to have darkness at night…and what ever happened to space ads in the sky?/s
I have no clue where those would be situated, but i get the feeling that i should put "Kessler Syndrom before the end of my lifetime" on some Bingo Card.
Back-of-envelope math, so feel free to double-check my numbers:
Their satellite mirrors have a diameter of 18m and produce a beam with a diameter of 5km. That means per satellite the light that hits a potential solar panel on earth is ~1.3x10^{-5} as bright as the sun, or the other way around, you need 77,160 satellites to beam light to the same point on earth to have something resembling daylight. For reference: There are currently roughly 15,000 satellites in orbit, total.
Their satellites weigh 142kg each. Launch cost with a Falcon Heavy (the cheapest currently available) is ~1500$/kg. Launching those satellites would cost ~16.5 billion $. They claim that each satellite will be cheaper than 100,000$. So building them will cost 7.7 billion $, if they can get it down to that price, from current roughly 2 million $ per satellite.
A solar farm with an area of ~25 km^2 produces 1500-2500 MW, let’s be optimistic and use 2500MW. Revenue from selling solar electricity is roughly 0.16 $/kwh. So the farm makes about 400,000 $/hour. It will only want to use the “service” at night, so let’s say 12 h/day.
For the farm to be profitable that would mean it needs to run this setup through the night for 13.78 years to break even.
That would mean that Reflect Orbital needs to build and run said solar farm.
However, Reflect Orbital plans to charge 5,000 $/h “for direct sunlight”, which in my mind would mean 5,000 $/h for all 77,160 satellites. In that case it would take them 3,898.5 years to break even, if they can rent out their satellites 24h a day.
If they want to charge their customers per satellite, the solar farm could rent out the satellites for 3.73 seconds, before it burns through its hourly revenue.
"Grift" has become the reddit tech doomer buzzword. If you're not chinese bot, just ignore it. These idiots actually think they're not going to be able to sleep because of this, so hilariously stupid.
In actuality, it's just a way to increase efficiency for solar power grids (sunlight at night), provide light for companies that have nighttime work like construction. Could also be used for locating missing people at night, navigating disaster zones etc.
It's not that we get too much sun energy... It's more that we fail to harvest it for our energy needs. If we produced our electrical energy needs from just solar we'd be really ok with the amount of sun the planet gets.
Man this is some bullshit. This is something that I don’t think should be allowed at all. We’re messing with systems we don’t even fully comprehend yet.
"A search-and-rescue team locates a missing person in minutes. A city has safer, evenly lit streets without the carbon emissions. Construction projects complete in half the time with teams able to work through the night safely."
We have huge floodlights that can operate on batteries charged from solar. We don't build at night because we're uuhhhhhhhhhh sleeping. Fuck these assholes
"We don't build at night because we're uuhhhhhhhhhh sleeping."
I've always been a night owl, and after being deployed to the Middle East I decided that the sun and I really didn't get along. I also have trouble being around people so I live on the side of a mountain, and I am more of a night owl than ever before. This whole concept is honestly terrifying to me on a psychological level. Hell, I have to drive 750 miles to see my family, and I always drive at night to avoid having to deal with other drivers.
Won't everyone love living next to a construction site active 24 hours a day? Don't like it? Don't be poor, and you can live in your isolated estate just fine!
The only reasonable use I can think of for an orbital mirror in Earth orbit would be to make it geostationary and use it to supply 24/7 energy directly to a dedicated solar array far from any human settlement, observatory or sensitive natural area. Perhaps start building offshore equatorial solar arrays well out in the ocean and position mirrors over them. This might be marginally useful in some areas during the rainy season where there is less direct sunlight. But it almost certainly isn't worth the cost of putting the mirrors up there and paying for maintenance missions.
The uses the company have listed are absurd and unnecessary, but most suspiciously they are not justified by the initial and ongoing cost of an orbital mirror. Unfortunately, this technology is rife for abuse, e.g., psychological warfare against populations where you light up an enemy city, warzone or rebellious area 24/7. Or localised weather modification. I am willing to bet that militaries are already weighing the possibilities and that's a big part of what this is about (aside from being an obvious tech bro grift).
Aside from the obvious risk to astronomy (a mispointed beam can easily fry the sensitive optics from a telescope) it is also such a revolting idea to capitalize the fucking sun.
If this works, it isn't clean. An effective increase in cross section of Earth to isolation is an increase in warming.
If you do the opposite and bounce light away you just build in fragility, since the removal of the mirror returns the warming to a system in which you ignored the root cause. And there will definitely be a mad scientist trying to impress his girlfriend who will eventually move it.
If you redistribute light which was going to hit anyway, you're literally stealing daylight on behalf of a paying customer. You would need some kind of p2p system where parties agree, in an environment where sunlight has never been traded in that fashion, and the above fragility arguments still largely hold, if only for the local ecology in both locations.
Hopefully they burn some investors and nothing comes of it.
Some areas already receive too much sunlight - so would likely be pleased with a reduction - though it would be tiny. But there are a lot of dangers with this kind of technology.
>If you do the opposite and bounce light away you just build in fragility, since the removal of the mirror returns the warming to a system in which you ignored the root cause.
Having entered a cartoonish era of super vilains with space focus lenses would have been funny, if so many people were not dying because of their crimes
Going to space to harvest light... because it's so hard to get it on the surface of the planet?
All the pollution and cost of putting them in space in the first place. Incredibly wasteful.
They have got a screw loose.
Cluttering up the orbit of the planet for this complete nonsense.
Fucking Americans ruining the world for everybody else. Can't they give it a rest for a bit. Are they doing selective breeding for idiocy or James Bond Villainy or something.
This is where you boycott companies/countries that do these things. How many people are boycotting phones that connect to spacex satellites? No one. How many people globally are boycotting countries that withdrew from the Paris climate treaty or nuclear test ban treaty? Thats not happening either. The market decides, and we are the market.
Great... let's just redirect more solar energy to the earth and warm it up even faster. What they should be doing instead is covering unusable areas of our planet with solar panels first. We have enormous deserts that are just getting bigger that are just begging to be harvested for solar energy.
I was hoping today would be a relaxing, calm day, but I made the mistake of reading this article and it is yet another sign that the future is going to be truly fucked.
I really don't know how solar mirrors are cheaper than figuring out better energy storage for renewables. We're already started with sodium-ion batteries.
I wish this was an onion article. What a dumb, wasteful, and dangerous idea. Like launching nuclear waste into space, except with that, I can see how they spit balled the idea. This is awful
Just want to say that most people have got it completely wrong what this company is trying to do. Having seen a presentation from one of the founders and been able to ask them questions about the concept, I don't necessarily think its a viable business plan, but it's also not the doomsday machine that people seem to be conflating it with.
rosielunet | 20 hours ago
Ground-based astronomy is already fighting for its life against massive satellite constellations like Starlink. If we start launching tens of thousands of literal mirrors into orbit to artificially brighten the night sky, we are going to permanently ruin our ability to observe deep space from Earth
oroborus68 | 20 hours ago
And fuck up the circadian rhythm of everything.
mojofrog | 15 hours ago
It's such a scam.
https://eighteenthelephant.com/2026/03/12/space-mirrors-solar-panels-fools-and-their-money/
Mcozy333 | 17 hours ago
plants will not be able to Flower !!! continual Veg state all the time no more pollen !!!
Spekingur | 9 hours ago
“Pay only $999.99 a year to ensure your plants get enough sunlight!”
Mcozy333 | 7 hours ago
AI Sunlight @ That
ShiftyShankerton | 11 hours ago
Dude chill out its just a test
oroborus68 | 11 hours ago
It's a scam. Read that article above. Thank you u/mojofrog🙏
thinkthingsareover | 5 hours ago
I found an article on it.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/ktla.com/news/southern-california-firm-approved-to-test-space-mirror-that-would-bring-light-to-dark-parts-of-earth/amp/
"According to the site, the company plans on deploying two satellites by the end of 2026 that will be able to reflect light at 0.1 lux — or as they say, “comparable to a full moon” — for five minutes.
By 2027, they predict they will have 36 satellites in orbit that are capable of reflecting light at 2 lux for 2.5 hours, which Reflect Orbital says is comparable to street lighting.
Fast forward to 2035, and the firm wants to have more than 50,000 satellites orbiting Earth that are capable of reflecting enough light to mimic daytime for hours. They say the satellites could also operate at 100 lux — comparable to indoor work areas — for 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
Luckily there's already been push back.
"According to the documents, several entities were against the license approval for a number of reasons, such as radio frequency interference and space debris mitigation. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, “a flood of opposition” came in from astronomers and wildlife experts, among others, who said that the light from the mirrors could “distract airplane pilots, wreak havoc on astronomical observations and interfere with circadian rhythms — the light-and-dark cycles that help people function, animals and plants know when to wake and sleep, to bloom or to migrate.”
Unfortunately the Feds decided it would be fine.
"We therefore disagree with assertions that ReflectOrbital has not demonstrated its proposed operations are in the public interest,” the FCC license reads. “To the contrary, it is in the public interest to make spectrum available to encourage companies to test new and innovative space activities, as it promotes American innovation and the new services and economic growth that come from that innovation.”
RosieBaby75 | 20 hours ago
We’re going to be not able to sleep if mirrors are used to make it not dark at night.
Making people not be able to sleep is a form of torture. Actually. Look into it.
Kahnza | 19 hours ago
Yeah, now think of all the animals that can't go inside a house and close the blinds. It's gonna be horrific.
ElectroMagnetsYo | 18 hours ago
Oh you’ll be able to sleep in darkness, for a premium.
cloudystateofmind | 17 hours ago
Sure, but think of the profits. Billionaires could have a subscription model to charge entire countries to have darkness at night…and what ever happened to space ads in the sky?/s
Mcozy333 | 17 hours ago
hey at least our solar panels will then work 24/ 7 !
florinandrei | 19 hours ago
But think of all the value that would be created for the shareholders! /s
crecentfresh | 17 hours ago
Wait these are going to be used to brighten the night? Wtf?
Alright I read the article and we need to monkey wrench these motherfuckers
Tysonviolin | 20 hours ago
They didn’t see it coming…
roam3D | 15 hours ago
I have no clue where those would be situated, but i get the feeling that i should put "Kessler Syndrom before the end of my lifetime" on some Bingo Card.
costafilh0 | 13 hours ago
Time to move to the moon.
p8nt_junkie | 8 hours ago
What dafuq would you want to brighten the night sky? It’s literally called ‘night’.
EpicBeardBattle | 22 hours ago
That’s a strong “could” given that it’s a really dumb concept. Just another tech bro grift to separate foolish investors from their money.
The_Winter_ | 21 hours ago
Explain?
EpicBeardBattle | 15 hours ago
Back-of-envelope math, so feel free to double-check my numbers:
Their satellite mirrors have a diameter of 18m and produce a beam with a diameter of 5km. That means per satellite the light that hits a potential solar panel on earth is ~1.3x10^{-5} as bright as the sun, or the other way around, you need 77,160 satellites to beam light to the same point on earth to have something resembling daylight. For reference: There are currently roughly 15,000 satellites in orbit, total.
Their satellites weigh 142kg each. Launch cost with a Falcon Heavy (the cheapest currently available) is ~1500$/kg. Launching those satellites would cost ~16.5 billion $. They claim that each satellite will be cheaper than 100,000$. So building them will cost 7.7 billion $, if they can get it down to that price, from current roughly 2 million $ per satellite.
A solar farm with an area of ~25 km^2 produces 1500-2500 MW, let’s be optimistic and use 2500MW. Revenue from selling solar electricity is roughly 0.16 $/kwh. So the farm makes about 400,000 $/hour. It will only want to use the “service” at night, so let’s say 12 h/day.
For the farm to be profitable that would mean it needs to run this setup through the night for 13.78 years to break even.
That would mean that Reflect Orbital needs to build and run said solar farm.
However, Reflect Orbital plans to charge 5,000 $/h “for direct sunlight”, which in my mind would mean 5,000 $/h for all 77,160 satellites. In that case it would take them 3,898.5 years to break even, if they can rent out their satellites 24h a day.
If they want to charge their customers per satellite, the solar farm could rent out the satellites for 3.73 seconds, before it burns through its hourly revenue.
Hope this helps.
Edit: Messed up the area of the solar farm
oniume | 11 hours ago
r/theydidthemaths
dungeoncrawler71520 | 20 hours ago
A big ol tech company getting a shit load of tax payer money to do some dubious stuff.
truecakesnake | 17 hours ago
"Grift" has become the reddit tech doomer buzzword. If you're not chinese bot, just ignore it. These idiots actually think they're not going to be able to sleep because of this, so hilariously stupid.
In actuality, it's just a way to increase efficiency for solar power grids (sunlight at night), provide light for companies that have nighttime work like construction. Could also be used for locating missing people at night, navigating disaster zones etc.
oniume | 16 hours ago
If its powerful enough to actually provide solar power, its powerful enough to stop people from sleeping
truecakesnake | 6 hours ago
No shit. But why would they do that dude. I assure you life will go much better if you stop thinking everyone is out to get you.
SteelyEyedHistory | 16 hours ago
Lol
truecakesnake | 6 hours ago
It is funny how stupid these comments are.
Klutzy_Act2033 | 19 hours ago
Why are they beaming more sun energy to a planet that is already keeping too much sun energy?
Altruistic-Rice-5567 | 11 hours ago
It's not that we get too much sun energy... It's more that we fail to harvest it for our energy needs. If we produced our electrical energy needs from just solar we'd be really ok with the amount of sun the planet gets.
Klutzy_Act2033 | 11 hours ago
I didn't say we get too much sun energy, I said we keep too much of it.
GeronimoHero | 19 hours ago
Man this is some bullshit. This is something that I don’t think should be allowed at all. We’re messing with systems we don’t even fully comprehend yet.
DocJawbone | 11 hours ago
Always has been
shongage | 45 minutes ago
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
aucme | 19 hours ago
Why would anyone think this is a good idea?
badken | 13 hours ago
The only people who think this is a good idea are the people cashing in on the grift.
No_Size9475 | 19 hours ago
"A search-and-rescue team locates a missing person in minutes. A city has safer, evenly lit streets without the carbon emissions. Construction projects complete in half the time with teams able to work through the night safely."
This is insanity.
DropTheBeatAndTheBas | 19 hours ago
yea search and rescue need to know where to point the mirror and the other cases we already got light 😭😭😂😂😂
crecentfresh | 16 hours ago
We have huge floodlights that can operate on batteries charged from solar. We don't build at night because we're uuhhhhhhhhhh sleeping. Fuck these assholes
thinkthingsareover | 5 hours ago
"We don't build at night because we're uuhhhhhhhhhh sleeping."
I've always been a night owl, and after being deployed to the Middle East I decided that the sun and I really didn't get along. I also have trouble being around people so I live on the side of a mountain, and I am more of a night owl than ever before. This whole concept is honestly terrifying to me on a psychological level. Hell, I have to drive 750 miles to see my family, and I always drive at night to avoid having to deal with other drivers.
schistkicker | 16 hours ago
Won't everyone love living next to a construction site active 24 hours a day? Don't like it? Don't be poor, and you can live in your isolated estate just fine!
getaway_dreamer | 3 hours ago
The only reasonable use I can think of for an orbital mirror in Earth orbit would be to make it geostationary and use it to supply 24/7 energy directly to a dedicated solar array far from any human settlement, observatory or sensitive natural area. Perhaps start building offshore equatorial solar arrays well out in the ocean and position mirrors over them. This might be marginally useful in some areas during the rainy season where there is less direct sunlight. But it almost certainly isn't worth the cost of putting the mirrors up there and paying for maintenance missions.
The uses the company have listed are absurd and unnecessary, but most suspiciously they are not justified by the initial and ongoing cost of an orbital mirror. Unfortunately, this technology is rife for abuse, e.g., psychological warfare against populations where you light up an enemy city, warzone or rebellious area 24/7. Or localised weather modification. I am willing to bet that militaries are already weighing the possibilities and that's a big part of what this is about (aside from being an obvious tech bro grift).
sight19 | 18 hours ago
Aside from the obvious risk to astronomy (a mispointed beam can easily fry the sensitive optics from a telescope) it is also such a revolting idea to capitalize the fucking sun.
SemanticTriangle | 21 hours ago
If this works, it isn't clean. An effective increase in cross section of Earth to isolation is an increase in warming.
If you do the opposite and bounce light away you just build in fragility, since the removal of the mirror returns the warming to a system in which you ignored the root cause. And there will definitely be a mad scientist trying to impress his girlfriend who will eventually move it.
If you redistribute light which was going to hit anyway, you're literally stealing daylight on behalf of a paying customer. You would need some kind of p2p system where parties agree, in an environment where sunlight has never been traded in that fashion, and the above fragility arguments still largely hold, if only for the local ecology in both locations.
Hopefully they burn some investors and nothing comes of it.
mildlyinterestingyet | 17 hours ago
Also, sending a rocket to space isnt clean either!
QVRedit | 19 hours ago
Some areas already receive too much sunlight - so would likely be pleased with a reduction - though it would be tiny. But there are a lot of dangers with this kind of technology.
clgoh | 15 hours ago
>If you do the opposite and bounce light away you just build in fragility, since the removal of the mirror returns the warming to a system in which you ignored the root cause.
Yup. It's called termination shock.
favperson13 | 18 hours ago
This was literally a nazi super weapon what the fuck lmao
steveschoenberg | 16 hours ago
The US is cancelling solar and wind power installations, but this nonsense is going ahead?! Adult supervision is needed.
WillingnessUseful718 | 19 hours ago
Isnt there a sub for dangerous patents?
M1K3jr | 17 hours ago
r/ObscurePatentDangers
happywindsurfing | 17 hours ago
For fucks sake, they're taking away night time in order to make money . WTH is wrong with our society.
This summer it feels like the last thing Earth needs is more sunlight, direct or otherwise.
amateurviking | 18 hours ago
Why tho? What’s the utility here?
Hey-Bud-Lets-Party | 17 hours ago
It’s for rich Redditors who are scared of the dark
BONEPILLTIMEEE | 17 hours ago
to kill vampires at night
Doridar | 16 hours ago
Having entered a cartoonish era of super vilains with space focus lenses would have been funny, if so many people were not dying because of their crimes
Informal_Drawing | 18 hours ago
Going to space to harvest light... because it's so hard to get it on the surface of the planet?
All the pollution and cost of putting them in space in the first place. Incredibly wasteful.
They have got a screw loose.
Cluttering up the orbit of the planet for this complete nonsense.
Fucking Americans ruining the world for everybody else. Can't they give it a rest for a bit. Are they doing selective breeding for idiocy or James Bond Villainy or something.
cloudystateofmind | 17 hours ago
This is where you boycott companies/countries that do these things. How many people are boycotting phones that connect to spacex satellites? No one. How many people globally are boycotting countries that withdrew from the Paris climate treaty or nuclear test ban treaty? Thats not happening either. The market decides, and we are the market.
Informal_Drawing | 14 hours ago
Governments are supposed to regulate companies so that they don't do stupid things.
This is actively encouraging stupid things.
You've got it backwards, but I suppose your only tool is a hammer the way you talk about markets.
ContributionBig996 | 18 hours ago
got permission? Well, not from me... I am not stupid.
MatlowAI | 17 hours ago
Sounds like a first step towards targeted nighttime ads in space...
Busterlimes | 13 hours ago
Im sure this will do great things for climate change. . . . .
picturesfromthesky | 12 hours ago
Never before have I actually hoped for a launch failure.
vilette | 19 hours ago
How do they manage clouds ?
ol0pl0x | 18 hours ago
Just firing up that haarp thingy again.
Altruistic-Rice-5567 | 11 hours ago
Great... let's just redirect more solar energy to the earth and warm it up even faster. What they should be doing instead is covering unusable areas of our planet with solar panels first. We have enormous deserts that are just getting bigger that are just begging to be harvested for solar energy.
BabyLegsOShanahan | 18 hours ago
Why?
SnooStories4162 | 16 hours ago
Yeah, nothing could possibly go wrong with this /s
Lost_Madness | 16 hours ago
Watch them butcher this and we get a perpetual darkness due to mirror misalignment
Andre1661 | 16 hours ago
I was hoping today would be a relaxing, calm day, but I made the mistake of reading this article and it is yet another sign that the future is going to be truly fucked.
Jorpsica | 15 hours ago
There was a futurama episode about this.
Demolisher05 | 14 hours ago
I really don't know how solar mirrors are cheaper than figuring out better energy storage for renewables. We're already started with sodium-ion batteries.
Sea_404 | 14 hours ago
The math ain't matching on this, much like the data centers. The fucking math and timescale are nonsense
Iron_Baron | 8 hours ago
Here's an idea. Who wants to crowd fund a disposable rocket company for shooting these things down from international waters?
Due_Satisfaction2167 | 14 hours ago
Sigh getting these back down out of orbit is going to be so expensive.
costafilh0 | 13 hours ago
That's the easy part. Still sceptical.
HellaTightHairCuts | 12 hours ago
I wish this was an onion article. What a dumb, wasteful, and dangerous idea. Like launching nuclear waste into space, except with that, I can see how they spit balled the idea. This is awful
slaty_balls | 12 hours ago
Only good thing I could see for these things is pointing sunlight away from the planet to help curb warming, not towards.
deltaz0912 | 11 hours ago
Label me a contrarian, but I love this idea. City, town, and highway lighting without power generation or distribution. That’s awesome all by itself.
gaflar | 20 hours ago
Just want to say that most people have got it completely wrong what this company is trying to do. Having seen a presentation from one of the founders and been able to ask them questions about the concept, I don't necessarily think its a viable business plan, but it's also not the doomsday machine that people seem to be conflating it with.
MuscaMurum | 19 hours ago
What is it then?
roehnin | 18 hours ago
it's a way to use something innocuous like providing light at night when needed, to practice aiming focused sun ignition beams