A New Kind of Satellite Could Damage Your Eyes

By: Anthony Mallama September 9, 2025 20

Reflect Orbital plans to launch gigantic satellites to reflect sunlight into regions where night has already fallen, potentially harming eyes, altering sleep, and blocking the starry sky.

Reflect Orbital employees pose with a large mirror surface.
*Reflect Orbital*

Bright communication satellites in low-Earth orbit are beginning to interfere with astronomical observing. These constellations of spacecraft — including BlueBird, Starlink, Kuiper, Qianfan, and Guong — unintentionally reflect sunlight to observers on the ground during the hours of darkness.

Soon, a new type of satellite will intentionally beam sunlight to Earth’s surface at night. Reflect Orbital has raised $20 million in funding to begin work on their planned constellation, according to a report in PayloadSpace.com. The company intends to launch a demonstration spacecraft next year to advertise their services to potential customers. That 324-square-meter (3,488-square-foot) satellite will be about five times larger than the giant BlueBirds from AST SpaceMobile, whose luminosity can rival the brightest stars. The Reflect Orbital demo satellite would direct a beam of sunlight to spots on the ground 5 kilometers (3 miles) in diameter. A specially shaped reflective mylar film will provide illumination that rivals the full Moon.

Furthermore, the company plans to launch 4,000 much larger satellites over the next several years. (For comparison, only a few hundred BlueBirds are planned over the next few years.) Those bigger spacecraft would each cover about three-fourths of an acre and far exceed the full Moon’s brightness. Nearly all of the stars would disappear for observers within illuminated areas on the ground. Residents of municipalities and other entities that purchase illumination would be deprived of darkness at night, not to mention the beauty of the star-lit sky.

Diagram of satellite orbit along Earth's terminal — Satellites would orbit along the Earth’s terminator line, which separates day and night.
*Reflect Orbital*

Reflect Orbital’s motivation is to sell reflected sunlight to solar energy farms. Speaking at at the International Conference on Energy from Space, the company’s CEO, Ben Nowack, said, “It would be really great if we could get some solar energy before the Sun rises and after sunset, because then you could actually charge higher prices and make a lot more money.”

The satellites’ effect on professional astronomical observatories in remote locations is less clear. Those facilities should be outside the beams of directed sunlight, but it’s possible the spacecraft could reflect some of the light diffusely, which would be a problem for all locations. At the very least, reflected sunlight will scatter when it reaches Earth’s atmosphere, increasing night sky brightness beyond the planned size of the region on the ground.

There are safety and environmental issues as well. My colleague, Richard Cole, calculated that the Reflect Orbital spacecraft would appear as points of light with a magnitude of -15, and he questioned how the eye would respond. John Barentine of Dark Sky Consulting pointed out research on eye safety — conducted by James Laframboise (a physicist and amateur astronomer) and Ralph Chou (a professor of optometry) — which warns that Sun-reflecting satellites this large might damage the eye. The effect of Sun reflections on wildlife has raised additional concerns.

A member of the Reflect Orbital team told OrbitalToday.com, “Give us four minutes. If everyone hates it, we can turn it off.” That seems unlikely given the large sums of money already invested.

The company must be licensed by the Federal Communications Commission before they launch any satellites, though, and resistance is building. Recently, the American Astronomical Society distributed a survey to “gather input from astronomers, observatories, and night sky users worldwide regarding the potential impacts of Reflect Orbital’s proposed reflector satellites on astronomical research and night sky visibility.” The survey only takes about five minutes to complete, and Sky & Telescope encourages amateur astronomers of all stripes to respond.

Comments

Andrew James

September 10, 2025 at 5:42 am

Criminals! FCC should be sanction for crimes against humanity. Keep your junk in your own backyard, please.