A startup just got permission to launch space mirrors — and astronomers are sounding the alarm

There’s a quiet tension brewing between two groups who both look up at the sky — one sees opportunity, the other sees a threat.

Reflect Orbital, a California-based startup that calls itself “The Sunlight Company,” just received FCC approval to launch its first orbital mirror satellite. Named Eärendil-1, the spacecraft carries four film-based reflectors, each roughly 18 meters long, designed to bounce sunlight onto specific patches of Earth. The company sees it as a tool for construction sites working after dark and search-and-rescue operations, with a longer-term play of boosting solar farm output by extending daylight hours.

The satellite will operate in low Earth orbit. If the test goes well, the plan scales fast: two launches this year, and a long-term goal of deploying more than 50,000 satellites by 2035. At full capacity, the company says the constellation could deliver up to 36,000 lux of illumination — close to natural daylight — for several hours, or a steady 100 lux around the clock, roughly equivalent to a brightly lit office.

CEO Ben Nowack called the FCC green light a critical first step. “We appreciate the Commission’s recognition of the importance of testing innovative technology in space,” he said in a statement. “This license is the first step in rigorously validating the effectiveness of our technology and the associated safety measures.”

The concept draws a direct line to the Icarus satellite from the James Bond film Die Another Day — a fictional device that promised to “bring light and warmth to the darkest corners of the world” and end famine by enabling year-round crop growth. The real-world version shares that ambition, but it also shares something else: controversy.

Astronomers are calling this project worse than Starlink.

Tony Tyson, chief scientist at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, said Reflect Orbital’s plan is “crazier than the Starlink satellite constellation” — and Starlink has already been a persistent headache for observatories worldwide. The European Southern Observatory, which operates multiple large telescopes in the Atacama Desert, calculated that a fully deployed Reflect Orbital constellation would brighten the night sky above its facilities by a factor of three to four, severely limiting its ability to detect faint astronomical objects.

Some experts believe orbital reflectors could end up being more damaging to astronomy than even Elon Musk’s proposed million-satellite orbital data center project — or China’s parallel initiatives.

Environmental scientists have their own concerns. Extending daylight artificially, they argue, could disrupt circadian rhythms that plants, animals, and humans have evolved over millions of years. The natural day-night cycle is baked into nearly every biological system on the planet, and adding artificial illumination from orbit is an experiment with unknown consequences.

The FCC, however, offered little comfort to critics. The agency stated that scientific and environmental concerns fall outside its jurisdiction, which covers radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable communications within U.S. territory. Opponents should take their case to NASA or the EPA instead, the FCC said — adding that even if it did have jurisdiction, the project would likely have been approved anyway. “Making spectrum available to businesses to test entirely new space-based technologies is in the public interest,” the commission wrote. “It promotes U.S. innovation and the new services and economic growth that innovation brings.”

The result is a regulatory gap: the agency that can approve orbital mirrors isn’t responsible for what they do to the sky, and the agencies that care about the sky can’t stop the mirrors from going up.

Reflect Orbital plans to launch its first two satellites this year. For now, the only thing standing between Earth and an orbiting artificial sun is a test flight. And a growing chorus of astronomers hoping it fails.