When humans mess with the sun in science fiction, it’s often when a supervillain covers it up and imposes permanent darkness. A space tech company called Reflect Orbital wants to do the opposite: bring sunlight to the dark side of Earth courtesy of satellites equipped with giant mirrors. The FCC approved a single satellite as a test demonstration on Thursday, and many scientists are already unhappy about it.
The approval green-lights Reflect Orbital to send its Eärendil-1 satellite into orbit. It’s a relatively small spacecraft, weighing 142 kilograms (313 pounds).
Housed in its body is a thin-film square mirror measuring 18 meters by 18 meters (about 60 feet by 60 feet). The satellite is scheduled to launch into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 later in 2026.
Eärendil-1 promises to reflect sunlight onto Earth in a 3-mile circle that can be aimed basically anywhere that doesn’t have sunlight. The company has a web tool that shows you what this would look like, and it’s wide enough to light up entire neighborhoods, making it appear like daytime when it’s actually night.
Ostensibly, this would be used to power solar panels at night, thus bypassing their one big drawback: They can collect power only during the day. According to Reflect Orbital, electricity demand spikes right around sunset, which means power companies have to lean on other energy sources to handle the increased load. (Battery storage does help keep solar energy flowing after sundown.) That increases fossil fuel usage, which is a contributing factor to climate change.
Eärendil-1 is designed to reflect sunlight down to a roughly 3-mile radius, giving it the capacity to light up a small town.
Reflect Orbital says it wants to deploy 50,000 of these satellites if the tech demonstration proves successful. That would put 16.2 million square meters of mirrors in low Earth orbit to light up large portions of the Earth on demand. For now, only the single Eärendil-1 satellite is approved for launch.
Scientists say this could be a disaster
Academics have been opposing the launch of Eärendil-1 since long before its FCC approval. Over 1,800 comments (PDF) were made during the proposal stage, and most were negative.
Researchers tend to agree that having 50,000 satellites beaming sunlight back to the Earth might be just as bad as a supervillain blocking out sunlight entirely.
Multiple organizations filed complaints, including the American Astronomical Society and the advocacy group DarkSky International, citing potential problems with directing even modest amounts of sunlight back onto Earth in the middle of the night.
“The concept of illuminating Earth from orbit represents a new category of artificial light at night with global ecological, cultural and regulatory consequences,” DarkSky said in an open letter to Reflect Orbital. “Based on the current scientific evidence, we do not see a viable pathway for this technology to align with responsible lighting principles or with our mission to protect natural darkness.”
Astronomers are also high on the list of people who oppose a big mirror brightening up the night, noting that even a single mirror flying in front of a telescope can overwhelm sensitive equipment in observatories on Earth. And since most astronomy research has to be done at specific times, given the movement of the greater universe, sunlight-reflecting space mirrors would mean missed opportunities to collect essential data.
Scientists also are unhappy with the notion that a single company in one country could ruin the sky for the rest of the world.
Only one satellite is approved for testing right now, but Reflect Orbital wants to put 50,000 of them in orbit someday.
Blue skies and light pollution
Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory outside Munich, Germany, and author of a 2026 study showing the effects of large satellite constellations on astronomy, says that light scatter is a serious problem.
“The light from the satellites will also scatter in the atmosphere and raise the brightness of the whole sky,” Hainaut said in an email. This is why the sky is blue during the day, because sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere, and a similar effect would happen if thousands of satellites were to shine light down onto Earth. This light pollution would hinder efforts to view the stars, even if the mirrors weren’t pointed directly at observatories.
The American Astronomical Society noted that light scatter in the atmosphere would cause light pollution even in areas where the mirrors weren’t directly reflecting light. “An individual RO satellite like Eärendil-1 is expected to have an optical brightness of at least 2 to 4 times that of the full moon,” the AAS said in a complaint (PDF) to the FCC.
Reflect Orbital notes that there is “no established regulatory framework for space-based energy and lighting services,” and says it’s open to regulation and working alongside scientists. The company also says it intends to learn from its test satellite before sending additional satellites into space, and to do its best to avoid flashing its mirrors at observatories.
Experts remain skeptical. Hainaut says that Reflect Orbital has indicated that major observatories may be safe from the company’s satellite constellation, but wonders about university-scale observatories, amateur astronomers, and casual skygazers. These are problems that Hainaut insists must be dealt with before a large constellation is launched, but says that a single satellite might actually have some value.
“While I am professionally opposed to the deployment of the full constellation, I’m actually OK with the prototype,” Hainaut said. “It will give us (and everybody) a chance to measure the thing, to quantify how bright it is, and for Reflect Orbital to showcase their capabilities (for their business) and mitigation measures they envision (for everybody else).”
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