The Federal Communications Commission has approved a test satellite whose job is to bounce sunlight back to Earth. Reflect Orbital won permission to fly one spacecraft, named Earendil-1, as a way of delivering extra solar energy and wide-area lighting. The approval came despite objections from astronomers and the public.
The light is expected to cover an area about five kilometers wide. The mirror will need repointing every four minutes. That is only the first step. Reflect Orbital plans more than 50,000 satellites in operation by 2035, and the company says they will serve agriculture, emergency response and other industrial uses.
The objections
The case against it comes from a group of scientists writing in The Conversation. They argue the proposal has real safety and environmental problems. Flashes while a mirror repoints could disrupt pilots and drivers, they say, and the light could upset the circadian rhythms of plants, animals and people. Sensitive detectors in research telescopes, along with star-tracking cameras on lower-altitude satellites, could be overloaded and burned out. They also list space mirrors among the ideas that threaten astronomy.
The FCC itself drew a narrow line. It said the “risks of harm raised on the record regarding Reflect Orbital’s solar reflector are unrelated to the Commission’s role in authorizing use of radiofrequency spectrum.”
A crowded orbit
The authors place the approval inside a bigger pattern. Close to 11,000 SpaceX Starlink satellites are in orbit now. Anyone launching into low Earth orbit has to coordinate with SpaceX or risk collisions, they write, and they point to a near-miss between a Starlink and a Chinese satellite in December 2025. The Artemis I launch in 2022 and the Artemis II launch in 2026 both had small cutout windows in their timing to avoid satellites.
In February, SpaceX asked the FCC for one million more satellites for “AI data centers.” The authors say that is 40 times as many satellites as have ever been launched. The FCC accepted the filing, and scientists then had 30 days to model the effects. Four rival data-center proposals have since followed, each for tens of thousands of satellites, and SpaceX has proposed another 100,000.
The FCC was set up to regulate radio broadcasts, the authors note, and is now being asked to judge orbital safety. They suggest the Office of Space Commerce could take on some of that work, though recent budget cuts make it unlikely. The agency’s own recent paper on “emergent space activities” is titled “Spectrum Abundance for Weird Space Stuff.”
The authors say they are not arguing against satellites. Each one, they write, carries a cost that has to be counted.
