GoKawiilWhen humans mess with the sun in science fiction, it's often when a supervillain covers it up and imposes permanent darkness. A space tech company called Reflect Orbital wants to do the opposite: bring sunlight to the dark side of Earth courtesy of satellites equipped with giant mirrors. The FCC approved a single satellite as a test demonstration on Thursday, and many scientists are already unhappy about it.
The approval green-lights Reflect Orbital to send its Eärendil-1 satellite into orbit. It's a relatively small spacecraft, weighing 142 kilograms (313 pounds).
Housed in its body is a thin-film square mirror measuring 18 meters by 18 meters (about 60 feet by 60 feet). The satellite is scheduled to launch into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 later in 2026.
Eärendil-1 promises to reflect sunlight onto Earth in a 3-mile circle that can be aimed basically anywhere that doesn't have sunlight. The company has a web tool that shows you what this would look like, and it's wide enough to light up entire neighborhoods, making it appear like daytime when it's actually night.
Ostensibly, this would be used to power solar panels at night, thus bypassing their one big drawback: They can collect power only during the day. According to Reflect Orbital, electricity demand spikes right around sunset, which means power companies have to lean on other energy sources to handle the increased load. (Battery storage does help keep solar energy flowing after sundown.) That increases fossil fuel usage, which is a contributing factor to climate change.
Eärendil-1 is designed to reflect sunlight down to a roughly 3-mile radius, giving it the capacity to light up a small town. Reflect Orbital
Reflect Orbital says it wants to deploy 50,000 of these satellites if the tech demonstration proves successful. That would put 16.2 million square meters of mirrors in low Earth orbit to light up large portions of the Earth on demand. For now, only the single Eärendil-1 satellite is approved for launch.
Scientists say this could be a disaster
Academics have been opposing the launch of Eärendil-1 since long before its FCC approval. Over 1,800 comments (PDF) were made during the proposal stage, and most were negative.
Researchers tend to agree that having 50,000 satellites beaming sunlight back to the Earth might be just as bad as a supervillain blocking out sunlight entirely.
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