A startup called Reflect Orbital plans to put mirrors in orbit and sell their reflected sunlight to customers on the ground at night. Its first satellite, Earendil-1, has a launch contract with the Hyderabad-based Indian company Skyroot Aerospace.
The idea is not new in principle — Russia tested orbital reflectors in the 1990s — but this is the first attempt to run it as a business, and the first time astronomers have had a specific object to measure.
What the regulator has and has not allowed
The US Federal Communications Commission has approved the satellite's deployment, but not the act of reflecting light to the ground. That distinction is doing a lot of work. The FCC's remit is spectrum and orbital debris; nobody has clear authority over deliberately shining light at the Earth from space, which is why the approval covers only the part that fits an existing rule.
The American Astronomical Society has objected and is pressing for the reflection itself to be addressed.
The numbers in the new paper
A paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters put figures on the effect, and the figures are what make this more than a dispute about aesthetics.
A single mirror would illuminate a circle of about 2.5 kilometres radius to roughly 9.5 lux — dim by indoor standards, far brighter than a moonlit night. The mirror itself would appear about 40 times brighter than the full Moon, and its light pollution would be measurable up to 30 kilometres away.
The company's stated ambition is a constellation of about 400 mirrors. The paper's estimate for that case is a combined brightness of roughly 10,000 times the full Moon, visible from 80 kilometres away.
Why astronomers are the ones objecting first
Ground-based telescopes measure objects billions of times fainter than the Moon, and they do it by keeping stray light out. A moving source tens of thousands of times brighter than the night sky does not dim an image; it ruins the exposure entirely, and it does so along whatever track it happens to cross.
But the astronomers are the early warning, not the whole problem. Nocturnal animals navigate, feed and breed by natural light levels, and 9.5 lux is not a natural light level at night anywhere on Earth. Neither is a light source in the sky that can be sold by the hour.
The question underneath
The genuinely new thing here is not the engineering. It is that a company can change the night sky over a place without asking the people who live there, because the sky above a country is not something that country controls.
A mirror illuminating a construction site in one country pollutes the sky for thirty kilometres in every direction, across borders if the site is near one. There is no body that grants or refuses that permission. The FCC approving the satellite while declining to address the light is not an oversight — it is an accurate picture of how little law exists here.
For readers in Bangladesh, where any serious astronomy already fights the light of a dense and growing grid, the practical point is simple: this is one of the few forms of light pollution that cannot be fixed locally by shielding a lamp.
