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FCC approves giant space mirror as astronomers warn of risks to the night sky
(www.thebrighterside.news)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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oh cool, more supervillains appropriating Tolkien
"Sunlight on demand" is an exaggeration. The plan is to create a 5km spot of 0.1 lux, which is a bit brighter than a full moon.
Every time I've seen this news posted (and I've seen it a lot over the past few days) everyone has leapt to some very extreme conclusions.
That would be multiplied by 50k according to their plan, wouldn't it? That's a lot of moons.
It would be completely impossible for them to all focus on the same spot, they'd be distributed around the world.
Also, that's not been approved. This approval is for a single prototype.
The amount of light pollution we have from cities is already more than necessary given that it covers makes most stars impossible to see.
I don't think a large quantity of small fake moons is gonna help with that.
Last time a proposal like this made the rounds on the Internet stirring up consternation, the proposal was to use space mirrors to replace the street lighting for the Chinese city of Chengdu. It would have had no net effect on light pollution and would have reduced electricity consumption to boot.
Bear in mind, this mirror focuses its light on a specific 5km-diameter patch of land. It won't be visible elsewhere.
The visibility doesn't consider the massive glow that would appear to anyone seeing them outside their intended area of use due to reflections off dust and particles in the atmosphere. Light pollution goes far outside the area where cities are for the same reason, and having these in low earth orbit as a replacement for streetlights or as a spotlight would both have that happening.
That's part of why experiments like this are done. Reflect Orbital would prefer that the spot be kept as tight as possible, they ultimately need to test out the technology to refine it.
Almost everyone in this thread seems to be jumping straight from "their first prototype was approved for testing" to "therefore every plan of theirs is about to be immediately implemented." And the dopamine that comes from the ensuing rage and fear is making it hard to accept otherwise, it'd kill the buzz.
I was not thinking about combining the beans, but about the surface that 50k of them would cover and the amount of additional light that would represent. I do hope it's just some vaporware.
Why would they spread the light evenly? They're planning on selling it. Someone would need to pay them to have a place illuminated, it's not going to be randomly beamed all over.
Again you're implying something I didn't mean, but the point is that having 50k times the equivalent of the moon light intensity is expected to have a bad impact on the environment.
I'm not seeing why. Do you have any links to sources about that? If they were to focus all 50,000 mirrors on one 5km patch of land simultaneously that'd be 5000 lux, which is less than 5% of the intensity of full sunlight at noon. It would be impossible to do this since the 50,000 mirrors would be spread around the Earth, and if you brought them all together into some kind of grand conjunction they'd only remain in position to do so for a few minutes.
Do we need a paper to estimate that ecosystems that evolved with a night time with a moon (mostly partial, sometimes absent), are going to be disturbed by having 50k of them? Also it's the new product's responsibility to demonstrate its safety.
I think you're drastically misunderstanding how this proposed constellation would work. It's not putting 50,000 "moons" in the sky. You can only see the light from the mirror in that one specific 5km patch of land that it's being aimed at. The vast majority of the world - including all the "wilderness", because who would pay to point these things at random patches of undeveloped wilderness - will not receive extra light from these things.
It's more like setting up floodlights at a construction site, or street lights in a city.
Earth's circumference is 40 000 km, if you align 50k patches of 5 km width, it covers more than 6 times this circumference. Current human's light pollution is already a biodiversity issue. This would be massively worsening the situation for just one system.
Only a single mirror has been approved.
Even if all 50,000 were up, where do you think they'll be aimed? Cities and other developed land, most likely. Last time something like this was proposed the plan was to replace streetlights with them, which would save electricity.
But people would rather get angry about "supervillains" I guess.