A satellite startup wants to fill the night sky with ultra-powerful beams of redirected sunlight. What could go wrong?
According to astronomers, almost everything. Reflect Orbital’s plans to launch 50,000 satellites equipped with giant mirrors is akin to “a bullet in your head,” says one astrophysicist, citing threats to both the natural world and the future of astronomy.
Selling the sun
Reflect offers “sunlight-as-a-service,” planning to use its constellation of satellites to beam down five-kilometer-wide rays of sunlight on demand, ranging in brightness from “noon light to moon light.”
Reflect’s website suggests potential use cases like powering solar panels, illuminating disaster zones and search-and-rescue missions, and lighting up worksites, cities, and events. But with a price tag of $5,000 for an hour of sunlight, the product would be prohibitively expensive for most customers—leaving critics to assume that only militaries and titans of industry are likely to make use of Reflect’s services, despite its altruistic branding.
So far, Reflect hasn’t actually launched any satellites. In August, it received approval from the Federal Communications Commission to launch a single demonstration satellite (much to the chagrin of environmental groups, which urged the FCC to reverse its decision). But moving forward, Reflect won’t need to seek approval from the U.S. government at all: It recently purchased two space launches located in India, which will be liable for any unintended consequences of satellites launched from within its borders under the Outer Space Treaty.
The end of astronomy
The prospect of messing with the day-night cycle immediately raised conccerns with environmentalists and astronomers alike, who are already contending with an increasingly crowded night sky thanks to spacecraft like SpaceX’s fleet of Starlink satellites.
Gaspar Bakos, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, told Sky & Telescope that Reflect’s plans for sunlight-on-demand are “essentially ignoring all the progress we have made for the past many decades in bringing awareness to and decreasing light pollution.”
Bakos and other astronomers worry that the beams would cause light diffusion throughout the night sky, making it incredibly difficult for ground-based telescopes to view objects in space. Amateur astronomers would also be at risk of permanent eye damage if they happened to see one of Reflect’s beams through a telescope greater than 12 inches in aperture.
Lighting up dark environments at night could also pose a threat to plants and animals that depend on the day-night cycle for biological regulation. That includes humans, whose own circadian rhythms dictate sleep patterns, hormones, and digestion among other bodily functions.
Light bulb moment
In an interview with Payload, Reflect CEO Ben Nowack responded to frequent concerns about his company’s plans. If astronomers are concerned about light pollution, Reflect will be sure to avoid getting in the way of their telescopes, he reasoned.
“If there’s an astronomer or a place that doesn’t want to see light, and they have a really hard brightness requirement … we will make sure that we don’t serve customers close[by],” Nowack said.
As for anxieties around the impact of life on Earth, Nowack chalks them up to a general fear of new technology.
“Similar concerns and fears were brought up when light bulbs were introduced to the world, and people were worried about circadian rhythm and like, is this godly?” he said.
Never mind the fact that Reflect’s beams of sunlight would be just a touch brighter than light bulbs, casting light for up to 30 kilometers from their targets. Each satellite would also appear in the sky as a point source four magnitudes brighter than the moon, according to a report by Bakos and his colleagues.
“This is not a ‘concern’—this is like a bullet in your head,” Bakos said. “It’s the end of ground-based astronomy.”
