Sunlight on Demand – Whose Night Is It, Anyway?

With the FCC holding no one responsible for regulating light pollution and other serious ill effects from the rapidly increasing number of satellites orbiting the Earth, let’s look at the problem a new startup aims to solve, because it is almost comically small. Solar panels do not work after dark. The sun sets and the panels go quiet. Reflect Orbital looked at that rhythmic fact of planetary life and decided the answer wasn’t, let’s say, batteries to keep the panels working. Nope, instead, the company plans to put a mirror in space and aim it at the sun and send light back down to the dark side of the Earth.

Last month, the FCC gave Reflect Orbital the green light to launch its first giant “space mirror,” a single satellite named Eärendil after the Tolkien character who carries a sacred light into the heavens. Hmmm, that is interesting. The clever name offers a big clue about how the company views itself and the power it aims to wield. And let’s be clear: one space mirror satellite is not the company’s plan. The plan is fifty thousand. Yes, 50,000 by 2035. A fleet of orbiting space mirrors, sold to the world as “sunlight on demand.”

But hold on a minute. The meaning behind “sunlight on demand” actually matters, and the idea of it and its precision falls apart once you look at the numbers. Importantly, reflected sunlight cannot be aimed with any precision because the sun is not a pinpoint. It is a disk half a degree wide in the sky, and that specific width sets a hard floor on how tight the sunbeam can be. The smallest spot that one of these mirrors can cast on the ground from orbit is about five kilometers across, and more like seven or eight kilometers when the satellite is beaming at an angle, which would be most of the time. In other words, three to five miles worth of dark night ground, lit up by a mirror from space. That expanse is the targeted beam provided by Reflect Orbital’s satellite. That is the company’s example of precision.

And not only is the beam at least three miles wide, it is also incredibly bright. One mirror beams down light that is roughly four times brighter than a full moon. And guess what? If enough of the satellites are linked together, nighttime can get even brighter. The company’s website promotes brightness ranging from “full moon to full noon.” The company is offering, as a product, the ability to turn night into noon over a swath of the planet that is several miles wide. All to keep sunlight on solar panels a little longer. It makes no sense.

But it gets stranger when you look at how the satellite keeps light on a target. Each mirror can tilt and aim, but the satellite carrying the mirror operates in low orbit around the earth, screaming along at nearly five miles a second. It is unable to hover. So, any single mirror can hold its beam on one spot for only about four minutes before it races out of position and the next mirror in the chain picks up the target, and so on. Thus, it becomes clear why the company needs 50,000 of them. Because it takes a conveyor belt of mirrors, each one aiming at the same field for four minutes, and handing off to the next, just to keep a single artificial sunbeam hovering over one spot for an hour.

So, what happens to the farmhouse or apartment complex sitting next to the solar farm? The intended goal of this project does not care about property lines, and a five-mile pool of light certainly does not stop politely at the edge of the solar farm. The nearby neighbors get the bright moonlight too, on a schedule set by a company they’ve probably never heard of. And definitely for a service they have not asked for. It is common knowledge that light at night suppresses melatonin and wrecks sleep in humans. That is not controversial; it is basic circadian biology. And the animals dependent upon the darkness of night have no say at all. We already know that artificial light scrambles the internal clocks of nocturnal creatures, and that migrating birds and the already vanishing insects run their entire life based upon it. Who in their right mind would be ok with dropping a counterfeit day into an ecosystem built—over millions of years—on the reliable return of the dark night?

For what? To power solar panels at night. This is the part that is hard to swallow. The light these mirrors drop on the ground is fifteen thousand times fainter than the actual midday sun. Thus, the solar panels sitting under it would generate only a small fraction of what they generate in the daylight, a little extra power, not more, while everything for miles around basks in a fake full moon. Who in their right mind would degrade the night across an entire rural county to squeeze merely a trickle of electricity out of a solar farm that could have easily been wired to a battery (or eliminated altogether, but that is another article). The problem with solar panels is that the sun sets every day. But is the solution fifty thousand mirrors and a permanently brighter sky?

But there is more—the part of this peculiar mission that oddly sits next to the solar-panel selling point. While Reflect Orbital talks about helping solar farms (and how their fake light could help search and rescue), the US Air Force has been quietly sending them money. In 2025, its research arm awarded the company a $1.25 million defense contract to develop reflector technology. The company’s own materials list defense as an intended use. So, what is a fleet that can drop a full moon-bright beam on any point on Earth, on command, worth to the military? For starters, perhaps lighting a battlefield without a single ground flare or turning night into day over a target that thought darkness was its cover. There is no need to conjure up a sinister motive here, but is there one? The same beam of fake light sold as a benefit to solar farms is, from a different angle, a searchlight the size of a city that answers to whoever has rights to the fleet. And there are no laws regulating who that can be or where they can point it.

For what it’s worth, the Soviets tried a smaller version of this unnatural experiment, and it is worth mentioning here. In 1993, they unfurled a mirror called Znamya (“Banner”) from the Mir space station, and for a few hours, a moon-bright spot sped across Europe from France to Russia. The mission behind the project was to prolong productivity. The nation wanted to abolish night so the working day could run longer. But the idea failed on the launchpad of the follow-up mission and was then abandoned. But now it is back, privatized, venture-funded, and pointed at all of us.

Which circles back to the license the FCC just granted to Reflect Orbital, and the 1,800 people—astronomers—who expressly begged the agency not to do so. When astronomers asked the FCC to weigh in on the ruined skies, the answer they received was that light pollution falls “beyond the scope” of its authority. So, we are left with the question that really matters, and that no one in a position of authority seems willing to answer. If the agency that just approved this project says the consequences are not its department, then whose night is it, and who gave it away?