![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Truman-Show-800x420.jpg\")
Screengrab from \u2018The Truman Show\u2019 when Christof (played by Ed Harris) turns the moon into a searchlight. <\/p>\n Screengrab from \u2018The Truman Show\u2019 when Christof (played by Ed Harris) turns the moon into a searchlight. <\/p>\n
Picture this: you\u2019re photographing in the middle of the night, it\u2019s dark, and you desperately need light. So, you whip out your phone, open an app, pay some money, and boom, night becomes day thanks to a satellite in the sky that is now reflecting sunlight to your location like a bright full Moon. <\/p>\n
If this sounds like a dystopian future that will never come, then you\u2019re dead wrong. The United States government has just approved Reflect Orbital\u2019s application to launch a mirror satellite into orbit called E\u00e4rendil-1. <\/p>\n
There has been much opposition and criticism of the decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to greenlight the Californian company\u2019s ambitious project \u2014 not least by astronomers who already fret about satellites obstructing humanity\u2019s view<\/a> of the Universe. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s terrifying to me that one country can change the night sky for everybody in the world,\u201d Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, tells The New York Times<\/a>. \u201cI need access to dark skies in order to do my research. If you\u2019ve got giant mirrors shining down, then we\u2019ve lost that.\u201d<\/p>\n About the same size as a bedside table, the E\u00e4rendil-1 will orbit Earth about 400 miles from the surface. There, it will unfurl a square mirror that\u2019s almost 60 feet wide. The mirror would then bounce sunlight toward a specified location and illuminate a circular patch about three miles wide. <\/p>\n Co-founder of Reflect Orbital, Ben Nowack, says the company plans to charge $5,000 for an hour\u2019s use of one mirror, so long as the customer has committed to using 1,000 hours annually. <\/p>\n $5 million per year is almost certainly outside of most photographers\u2019 budgets. A more likely customer is solar farms, which obviously stop generating electricity at night. There\u2019s also the prospect of using the artificial light in emergencies. However, that could be difficult to coordinate as well as being expensive. <\/p>\n The FCC has so far approved just one of these satellites, but Reflect Orbital has plans to launch 1,000 even larger satellites \u2014 180 feet wide that can reflect the same amount of light as 100 full Moons. <\/p>\n However, biologists warn of the dangers of such technology. \u201cThe proposed scale of orbital deployment would represent a significant alteration of the natural night-time light environment at a planetary scale,\u201d biologists from Europe, the U.S., Japan, and Canada tell The Guardian<\/a>. <\/p>\n The biology community says that altering the light-dark cycle could upset circadian rhythms that regulate sleep in humans and animals, as well as interrupting animal migration, plant cycles, and even phytoplankton in the sea that are vital to life. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Screengrab from \u2018The Truman Show\u2019 when Christof (played by Ed Harris) turns the moon into a searchlight. Picture…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":941585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[379230,3167,41972,192911,994,39200,151087,379231,159,98922,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-941584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-artificiallight","tag-daylight","tag-lightpollution","tag-mirror","tag-moon","tag-nighttime","tag-reflectorbital","tag-satellitemirror","tag-science","tag-sunlight","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116936639264476125","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/941585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}