A column about curious stories from the worlds of science, technology, and cinema. Today — no cinema, but a very cinematic plot: in October, Reflect Orbital staged a rehearsal for a satellite it has not yet launched in the California desert — hauling two enormous spotlights up a slope near Mount Whitney and shining them down into a dark valley, acting out what, in a couple of years, a spacecraft with a mirror in orbit is supposed to do. Local drivers and Lone Pine residents experienced it firsthand: one described the light in a newspaper with a single word — “blinding” — while astronomers learned about the test after the fact. But the most interesting thing here is not even the startup itself, but the long genealogy of the idea: people have been trying to sell sunlight for exactly a hundred years, and every previous round of this story ended the same way — brilliant in the literal sense, and sad in every other.
On the night of the test, it was supposed to be dark over Owens Valley at the foot of the Sierra — where Highway 395 passes the town of Lone Pine. It wasn’t. “Two giant spotlights lit an area larger than Manhattan at twice the brightness of a full moon,” DarkSky International, an organization that protects the dark sky, later wrote. The light source was not in orbit: Reflect Orbital, a Los Angeles-based California startup, hauled spotlights up a mountainside along Horseshoe Meadows Road and spent an entire night acting out what its future constellation plans to do — switch on a bright light from above, at the right moment and over the right spot. “Locals traveling along Highway 395 had no idea what it was,” DarkSky notes. One eyewitness was so outraged by the light that he called it “blinding” in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle.
The official purpose of the exercise was to practice its first commercial application: search and rescue. The company said it involved a volunteer search-and-rescue unit in the test, and they really did search — under the light of spotlights simulating the future “beam from space.” The format aligned seamlessly with the startup’s ambitions: “Search and rescue teams are our first customers, so these were real tests with the teams that will use our technology,” a Reflect Orbital spokesperson said. The plans for the coming years include bathing farmland in nighttime sunshine, replacing broken streetlights, and “solar energy on demand” for military operations: everything, as the pitch deck has it, “at the press of a button in an app.”
Except the test took place without astronomers’ knowledge or involvement — and without much publicity at all. After speaking to participants, DarkSky International tells the story of Philip Cash, operations director of the volunteer China Lake Mountain Rescue Group: when he arrived at the search area with the beams switched on, his first thought was, “Wow, I need a hat” — rescuers wear caps at night to shield their eyes from bright sources and protect the night vision that nighttime searches depend on. Colleagues looking toward the spotlights found the glare hard to bear; more light, Cash warned, can work against a search, too. To assess visibility, the company placed glossy white boxes around four feet long in the search area instead of weighted rescue mannequins: under the beams, the boxes could be seen farther away, but they did not make a good stand-in for a missing person — “they don’t simulate a body wearing clothes,” Cash explained.
The idea of reflecting sunlight from orbit is almost as old as the rocket age itself. In 1923, German rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth published The Rocket into Interplanetary Space — based on a dissertation Heidelberg University had rejected as “too implausible.” In the book, the mathematically impeccable author proposed, among other things, giant orbital mirrors: let them light cities through the polar night, aid rescue operations — Oberth seriously reasoned that a bright flash over the ocean might have prevented a disaster on the scale of the 1912 Titanic, or helped search for survivors.
The idea outlived the Weimar Republic and soon found itself in the polar coordinates of the Cold War. In 1945, Time magazine quoted testimony from captured German engineers: at the Nazi weapons-research center in Hillersleben, they had designed the Sonnengewehr — the “sun gun,” an orbital mirror weapon capable of focusing sunlight to set cities ablaze or evaporate lakes. The logic of the military mirror died with the Reich, but its peaceful sister was only beginning its journey.
In the seventies, Krafft Ehricke took it up — the German-American engineer who had been part of the V-2 team and later became an ideologue of space colonization. His Power Soletta project envisioned a ring of mirrors over the planet that would extend daylight and save energy. Ehricke died in 1984 without seeing it realized; fate had it that his cremated remains did make it into orbit in 1997 — in a capsule alongside the ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and psychologist Timothy Leary.
The only people who actually switched on “sunlight for hire” from space were the Soviet aerospace program. On February 4, 1993, the 20-meter film mirror Znamya-2 unfurled from the Progress M-15 spacecraft docked to the Mir station — an experiment BBC’s Tomorrow’s World had covered even before launch: the idea reached its apex in the slogan “to light Siberia’s polar cities with sunlight during the dark winter months.” The mirror worked: a 5-km-wide flash swept across Europe — from southern France to western Russia — at a speed of 8 km/s; observers aboard Mir saw the spot of light with their own eyes, and in some places it was spotted from the ground as well — despite cloud cover over most of the continent. The brightness within the spot was “roughly lunar,” and yet the physics worked in full, not merely on paper.
Znamya-2 had a sequel project. In 1999, designer Vladimir Syromyatnikov was preparing Znamya-2.5 — a 25-meter mirror that, once deployed, was meant to produce a 7-km-diameter spot at the brightness of 5–10 full moons, now with precise targeting: keep the beam in one place for minutes rather than smear it across a continent. But even before launch, Russian space officials began receiving complaints: astronomers feared the glare, both for human eyes and for telescopes; the Royal Astronomical Society sent an official protest to the head of the Space Regatta Consortium, and environmentalists joined in. Syromyatnikov answered the press with the fervor of a man who believed in the idea: “Think what it would mean for the future of mankind. No more electricity bills, no more long dark winters. This is a major technological breakthrough.” On February 5, 1999, Znamya-2.5 was supposed to deploy under the control of TsUP (Mission Control): Progress moved away from the station, the truss began opening — but at the same time, a command to deploy the docking antenna was sent by mistake, and the thin reflective film snagged on it. The mirror crumpled. Mission Control determined that the structure would not deploy — and the debris burned up in the atmosphere. The program died with the mirror: the planned Znamya-3, with its 70-meter sheet, never found funding, and the enthusiasm ran dry.
The modern round is counted not in film, but in money — and this time astrophysics has entered the game. Gáspár Bakos, a Princeton astrophysicist known for hunting exoplanets, took Reflect Orbital’s stated designs and ran the numbers honestly — using a radiative-transfer model of a three-dimensional atmosphere. The result was a paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters: a single 54×54-meter mirror (precisely the kind the company calls its target — the FCC-authorized 18-meter Earendil-1 prototype reflects only one ninth as much light) illuminates a spot with a radius of 2.5 km at roughly 9.5 lux — the level of a well-lit street in the evening, around 38 times brighter than a full moon. To an observer, the satellite itself is a minus-16.7-magnitude star: around 40 times brighter than the moon, and “pointlike” at that, because no optical instrument can dim it. In the atmosphere, the spotty 2.5-km “flashlight” — shining straight down — scatters into skyglow across dozens of kilometers around it, and that is the calculation for clear skies; with a cloud layer, the beam lights the entire dome from below.
And now the plan’s constants: 400 mirrors at 45°, reflecting with an albedo of 0.9, would deliver roughly 2400 lux in a single spot — ten thousand full moons, 2.4% of sunlight (the threshold at which solar panels wake up). That is no longer “little beams for finding lost hikers,” but the project’s industrial version. The authors note separately: for people beneath a 9.5-lux spot, it is a sudden “streetlit” night in the middle of a field; for animals, a disruption of seasonal and circadian programs; and for astronomers, new permanent skyglow with no single jurisdiction, because a beam knows no borders.
The contenders for the role of that “someone” moved swiftly into the regulatory field: on July 9, 2026, the FCC granted Reflect Orbital a license for Earendil-1 — a prototype with an 18×18-meter mirror in a 625-km orbit inclined at 88°, with launch scheduled for 2027. The FCC document is notable for two things. First: the American Astronomical Society filed a formal petition to deny, listing the risks to nighttime observation; other astronomical societies around the world submitted petitions and letters as well. The Commission responded that the petitioners’ concerns “do not warrant either denial or additional conditions” for this license — and also noted that eye-safety requirements for telescope observers were not grounds for denial either. Second: the NEPA environmental review fell into a category that did not require deep scrutiny. NEPA, the Commission explained, requires it to consider the “proposed action” — namely, the granting of a radio-frequency license — but not activities beyond its regulatory authority. So neither light pollution nor the fate of animals was substantively considered at any point in the decision.
In August, four groups — DarkSky International, Earthjustice, and two other organizations — asked the Commission to reconsider its decision. Earthjustice called the project “idiotic” and “insane,” while the organization’s senior attorney, Jan Hasselman, recalled that “all life on Earth evolved to the rhythm of day and night,” and that “there is more than enough evidence that breaking that rhythm is a bad idea.” At the same time, defenders of the night point to the legal void: light from space currently falls under no environmental agreement, which means that “who owns the night” is a question that, so far, has no answer in any legal framework — international or American.
The flip side of this story is that “selling light by subscription” is not paranoia or satire, but a perfectly viable business plan that already has a regulator’s license. The idea conceived by a dreamer whose doctorate Heidelberg stripped away for “implausibility” has been brought into hardware three times over a century: Znamya-2 worked; Znamya-2.5 was brought down by its own antenna; the California ground rehearsal dazzled rescuers. And all three times, they ran into the same thing: the mechanics of thin film in 1999; public outrage — from the Royal Astronomical Society to Earthjustice; in 2026, the simple fact that nobody included a light-pollution calculation in the FCC application. The physics has not changed in a hundred years: light arriving from above cannot stay only where it was ordered — it scatters. What changes is only who decides whom to shine on, and how: in 1993, it was engineer Syromyatnikov with a handful of budget rubles; in 2026, it is a startup with an app and an FCC that issued a license in the category “no environmental assessment.” Oberth, whose sketch started all this, dreamed of using mirrors to melt icebergs and clear sea routes; his heirs promise to sell light with a button in an app. A subscription, as everyone knows, is easier to sign up for than a dream.
Local drivers and Lone Pine residents were caught off guard by the event: one described the light in a newspaper with a single word — “blinding” — while astronomers learned about the test after the fact. But the most interesting thing here is not even the startup itself, but the long genealogy of the idea: people have been trying to sell sunlight for exactly a hundred years, and every previous round of this story ended the same way — brilliant in the literal sense, and sad in every other.
On the night of the test, it was supposed to be dark over Owens Valley at the foot of the Sierra — where Highway 395 passes the town of Lone Pine. It wasn’t. “Two giant spotlights lit an area larger than Manhattan at twice the brightness of a full moon,” DarkSky International, an organization that protects the dark sky, later wrote. The light source was not in orbit: Reflect Orbital, a Los Angeles-based California startup, hauled spotlights up a mountainside along Horseshoe Meadows Road and spent an entire night acting out what its future constellation plans to do — switch on a bright light from above, at the right moment and over the right spot. “Locals traveling along Highway 395 had no idea what it was,” DarkSky notes. One eyewitness was so outraged by the light that he called it “blinding” in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle.
The official purpose of the exercise was to practice its first commercial application: search and rescue. The company said it involved a volunteer search-and-rescue unit in the test, and they really did search — under the light of spotlights simulating the future “beam from space.” The format aligned seamlessly with the startup’s ambitions: “Search and rescue teams are our first customers, so these were real tests with the teams that will use our technology,” a Reflect Orbital spokesperson said. The plans for the coming years include bathing farmland in nighttime sunshine, replacing broken streetlights, and “solar energy on demand” for military operations: everything, as the pitch deck has it, “at the press of a button in an app.”
Except the test took place without astronomers’ knowledge or involvement — and without much publicity at all. After speaking to participants, DarkSky International tells the story of Philip Cash, operations director of the volunteer China Lake Mountain Rescue Group: when he arrived at the search area with the beams switched on, his first thought was, “Wow, I need a hat” — rescuers wear caps at night to shield their eyes from bright sources and protect the night vision that nighttime searches depend on. Colleagues looking toward the spotlights found the glare hard to bear; more light, Cash warned, can work against a search, too. To assess visibility, the company placed glossy white boxes around four feet long in the search area instead of weighted rescue mannequins: under the beams, the boxes could be seen farther away, but they did not make a good stand-in for a missing person — “they don’t simulate a body wearing clothes,” Cash explained.
The idea of reflecting sunlight from orbit is almost as old as the rocket age itself. In 1923, German rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth published The Rocket into Interplanetary Space — based on a dissertation Heidelberg University had rejected as “too implausible.” In the book, the mathematically impeccable author proposed, among other things, giant orbital mirrors: let them light cities through the polar night, aid rescue operations — Oberth seriously reasoned that a bright flash over the ocean might have prevented a disaster on the scale of the 1912 Titanic, or helped search for survivors.
The idea outlived the Weimar Republic and soon found itself in the polar coordinates of the Cold War. In 1945, Time magazine quoted testimony from captured German engineers: at the Nazi weapons-research center in Hillersleben, they had designed the Sonnengewehr — the “sun gun,” an orbital mirror weapon capable of focusing sunlight to set cities ablaze or evaporate lakes. The logic of the military mirror died with the Reich, but its peaceful sister was only beginning its journey.
In the seventies, Krafft Ehricke took it up — the German-American engineer who had been part of the V-2 team and later became an ideologue of space colonization. His Power Soletta project envisioned a ring of mirrors over the planet that would extend daylight and save energy. Ehricke died in 1984 without seeing it realized; fate had it that his cremated remains did make it into orbit in 1997 — in a capsule alongside the ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and psychologist Timothy Leary.
The only people who actually switched on “sunlight for hire” from space were the Soviet aerospace program. On February 4, 1993, the 20-meter film mirror Znamya-2 unfurled from the Progress M-15 spacecraft docked to the Mir station — an experiment BBC’s Tomorrow’s World had covered even before launch: the idea reached its apex in the slogan “to light Siberia’s polar cities with sunlight during the dark winter months.” The mirror worked: a 5-km-wide flash swept across Europe — from southern France to western Russia — at a speed of 8 km/s; observers aboard Mir saw the spot of light with their own eyes, and in some places it was spotted from the ground as well — despite cloud cover over most of the continent. The brightness within the spot was “roughly lunar,” and yet the physics worked in full, not merely on paper.
Znamya-2 had a sequel project. In 1999, designer Vladimir Syromyatnikov was preparing Znamya-2.5 — a 25-meter mirror that, once deployed, was meant to produce a 7-km-diameter spot at the brightness of 5–10 full moons, now with precise targeting: keep the beam in one place for minutes rather than smear it across a continent. But even before launch, Russian space officials began receiving complaints: astronomers feared the glare, both for human eyes and for telescopes; the Royal Astronomical Society sent an official protest to the head of the Space Regatta Consortium, and environmentalists joined in. Syromyatnikov answered the press with the fervor of a man who believed in the idea: “Think what it would mean for the future of mankind. No more electricity bills, no more long dark winters. This is a major technological breakthrough.” On February 5, 1999, Znamya-2.5 was supposed to deploy under the control of TsUP: Progress moved away from the station, the truss began opening — but at the same time, a command to deploy the docking antenna was sent by mistake, and the thin reflective film snagged on it. The mirror crumpled. Mission Control determined that the structure would not deploy — and the debris burned up in the atmosphere. The program died with the mirror: the planned Znamya-3, with its 70-meter sheet, never found funding, and the enthusiasm ran dry.
The modern round is counted not in film, but in money — and this time astrophysics has entered the game. Gáspár Bakos, a Princeton astrophysicist known for hunting exoplanets, took Reflect Orbital’s stated designs and ran the numbers honestly — using a radiative-transfer model of a three-dimensional atmosphere. The result was a paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters: a single 54×54-meter mirror (precisely the kind the company calls its target — the FCC-authorized 18-meter Earendil-1 prototype reflects only one ninth as much light) illuminates a spot with a radius of 2.5 km at roughly 9.5 lux — the level of a well-lit street in the evening, around 38 times brighter than a full moon. To an observer, the satellite itself is a minus-16.7-magnitude star: around 40 times brighter than the moon, and “pointlike” at that, because no optical instrument can dim it. In the atmosphere, the spotty 2.5-km “flashlight” — shining straight down — scatters into skyglow across dozens of kilometers around it, and that is the calculation for clear skies; with a cloud layer, the beam lights the entire dome from below.
And now the plan’s constants: 400 mirrors at 45°, reflecting with an albedo of 0.9, would deliver roughly 2400 lux in a single spot — ten thousand full moons, 2.4% of sunlight (the threshold at which solar panels wake up). That is no longer “little beams for finding lost hikers,” but the project’s industrial version. The authors note separately: for people beneath a 9.5-lux spot, it is a sudden “streetlit” night in the middle of a field; for animals, a disruption of seasonal and circadian programs; and for astronomers, new permanent skyglow with no single jurisdiction, because a beam knows no borders.
The contenders for the role of that “someone” moved swiftly into the regulatory field: on July 9, 2026, the FCC granted Reflect Orbital a license for Earendil-1 — a prototype with an 18×18-meter mirror in a 625-km orbit inclined at 88°, with launch scheduled for 2027. The FCC document is notable for two things. First: the American Astronomical Society filed a formal petition to deny, listing the risks to nighttime observation; other astronomical societies around the world submitted petitions and letters as well. The Commission responded that the petitioners’ concerns “do not warrant either denial or additional conditions” for this license — and also noted that eye-safety requirements for telescope observers were not grounds for denial either. Second: the NEPA environmental review fell into a category that did not require deep scrutiny. NEPA, the Commission explained, requires it to consider the “proposed action” — namely, the granting of a radio-frequency license — but not activities beyond its regulatory authority. So neither light pollution nor the fate of animals was substantively considered at any point in the decision.
In August, four groups — DarkSky International, Earthjustice, and two other organizations — asked the Commission to reconsider its decision. Earthjustice called the project “idiotic” and “insane,” while the organization’s senior attorney, Jan Hasselman, recalled that “all life on Earth evolved to the rhythm of day and night,” and that “there is more than enough evidence that breaking that rhythm is a bad idea.” At the same time, defenders of the night point to the legal void: light from space currently falls under no environmental agreement, which means that “who owns the night” is a question that, so far, has no answer in any legal framework — international or American.
The flip side of this story is that “selling light by subscription” is not paranoia or satire, but a perfectly viable business plan that already has a regulator’s license. The idea conceived by a dreamer whose doctorate Heidelberg stripped away for “implausibility” has been brought into hardware three times over a century: Znamya-2 worked; Znamya-2.5 was brought down by its own antenna; the California ground rehearsal dazzled rescuers. And all three times, they ran into the same thing: the mechanics of thin film in 1999; public outrage — from the Royal Astronomical Society to Earthjustice; in 2026, the simple fact that nobody included a light-pollution calculation in the FCC application. The physics has not changed in a hundred years: light arriving from above cannot stay only where it was ordered — it scatters. What changes is only who decides whom to shine on, and how: in 1993, it was engineer Syromyatnikov with a handful of budget rubles; in 2026, it is a startup with an app and an FCC that issued a license in the category “no environmental assessment.” Oberth, whose sketch started all this, dreamed of using mirrors to melt icebergs and clear sea routes; his heirs promise to sell light with a button in an app. A subscription, as everyone knows, is easier to sign up for than a dream.