The numbers are staggering. A single Reflect Orbital satellite would appear 40 times brighter than the full moon within its five-kilometer target zone. Even 14 kilometers away from the beam’s center, it would still match the moon’s brightness. And when the company eventually combines 400 satellites as planned, the combined light would reach 10,000 full moons — about 2.4% as bright as the sun itself.
That’s the finding from a new paper led by Miroslav Kocifaj at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Kocifaj and his colleagues modeled how light from Reflect Orbital’s planned mirrors would scatter through the atmosphere. Their conclusion: the damage extends far beyond the intended target area. Up to 80 kilometers away, the combined beam would still be visible as a glow above the horizon. “Deploying these mirrors would be seriously damaging for astronomy and for the nighttime environment,” Kocifaj says.
Reflect Orbital, which plans to launch its Eärendil-1 test satellite later this year after FCC approval in July, disputes the findings. CEO Ben Nowack says the paper’s assumptions are “simply inaccurate” and that the company’s safeguards, including exclusion zones, account for scattering. But Kocifaj counters that the company “gives no numbers, no description of the model, no assumptions, and no data. There is therefore nothing that can be engaged with technically.”
This isn’t the first warning. Olivier Hainaut at the European Southern Observatory previously calculated Reflect Orbital’s beams could brighten the sky up to 300% worldwide. The new work fills in the local picture. Hainaut says the two papers together “really cover most of it.” The broader context here is familiar territory: this is the same tension that played out with Starlink’s satellite constellations, except those were an unintended side effect of providing internet access. Reflect Orbital’s entire business model is built on deliberately adding light to the night sky. That distinction matters. In August, DarkSky International and the American Bird Conservancy urged the FCC to reverse its approval, citing risks to astronomy, aviation, and wildlife. The company’s own FCC filing acknowledged that observing Eärendil-1 without proper eye protection could pose risks to humans. The question now is whether regulators will treat deliberate sky brightening differently than incidental light pollution.
