On 9 July 2026, the FCC approved a satellite called Eärendil-1. It carries an 18-by-18 metre deployable mirror, built by a company called Reflect Orbital, designed to reflect concentrated sunlight down onto specific points on Earth after dark. It’s a demonstration for a stated long-term plan: a fleet of 50,000 identical satellites by 2035, selling sunlight on demand, anywhere, at night.
The approval went through over more than 1,800 public objections, and formal objections from the American Astronomical Society and DarkSky International. The FCC’s justification was a citation rather than a rebuttal: the 1934 Communications Act, which obliges the agency to encourage the development of new technology, and says nothing at all about the night sky.
What’s already true, before the fleet exists
The temptation is to treat this as a story about the future, one satellite ahead of a problem that hasn’t arrived yet. It understates what’s already measured. Roughly 14,000 satellites are already in orbit, more than 10,000 of them Starlink, and a further 1.7 million have been proposed across various constellations, most of them still awaiting launch, according to an ESO study published in July 2026. Fourteen thousand is already enough to matter; over a million would be a different sky entirely.
A 2021 study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, found that satellites and space debris were already raising night-sky brightness by more than 10% above natural levels across large parts of the planet — a figure five years and thousands of launches out of date. A newer study, led by Anthony Mallama and Richard Cole of the IAU Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky and published in the same journal in 2026, found that nearly all satellites in the major constellations already exceed the IAU’s own brightness limits for professional astronomical interference — before Reflect Orbital’s fleet has launched a single additional unit.
What it already costs, and who has no vote
ESO modelling shows the Vera Rubin Observatory’s new survey camera, which began operating in 2026, could lose hours of usable data a night to bright satellite trails. Olivier Hainaut, the ESO astronomer whose simulations underpin the study, found that a single Reflect Orbital mirror satellite could electrically saturate the camera’s detector, leaving a ghost trail that ruins an entire exposure — without the beam ever pointing at the observatory directly. At full fleet strength, every image taken while its satellites are illuminated could be wiped out. The ESO calculates that its own facilities would see background sky brightness rise three to four times under the complete 50,000-satellite constellation. Research into Indigenous rights and outer space, compiled for the IAU Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky’s policy work, documents a further cost: a bright, moving night sky disrupts navigation and oral traditions that depend on a dark one.
There is a body whose job is to care about this. The IAU Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky, formed in 2022 and jointly hosted by the Square Kilometre Array Observatory and NOIRLab, researches the problem, recommends brightness thresholds, and helped bring the issue onto the agenda of the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, COPUOS, the closest thing satellite governance has to a global forum. Getting an item onto that agenda is not the same as having a rule adopted, and adoption is not the same as enforcement. The centre has no binding authority anywhere, and nothing compels a licensing body like the FCC to consult it, weigh its findings, or even acknowledge them before granting an approval.
That’s the actual gap. It isn’t a missing rule about satellites, or a loophole Reflect Orbital found and exploited. Licensing bodies like the FCC were built to assess a technical filing: spectrum use, orbital slot, signal interference. They were never built to weigh a diffuse, global, shared-commons harm with no single financial cost and no single injured party who can bring a claim. The Royal Astronomical Society said as much in May 2026, arguing that “nighttime should be recognised as an integral part of the natural environment, requiring protection on a par with daytime activities” — a status it holds nowhere.
The approval that starts a fleet of 50,000 mirrors has already happened. The body that granted it wasn’t required to weigh the night sky against the mandate it exists to serve, because nowhere does that requirement exist. What would it take for the sky itself to become a party with standing in a process built entirely around the applicant?
My Opinion
This is what approval-first looks like when nobody has mapped the consequences. Lighting the sky for hours after dark, night after night, is not a neutral act — it will affect sleep, wildlife, crops, and cultures in ways nobody has finished studying, and the fleet is being built anyway. The question underneath the licensing gap isn’t really about satellites — it’s whether any single body should have the authority to make a decision that reaches every person on the planet without asking them first. I don’t think it should. Not yet, and not like this.
You’re reading The Next Evolution by Neil Catton, articles that explore the human world and the intersection of technology, they try and ask difficult questions - not to scare - but to inform. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe free at neilcatton.substack.com.
Neil Catton is the author of The Next Evolution, The Cognitive Crucible and The Shadow System - available on Amazon, and writes at the intersection of technology, ethics, and human purpose.