500
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
500 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
87575 readers
3805 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"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.