“Astronomers worry that a constellation of orbital mirrors like Reflect Orbital is planning might compromise the ability to view the night skies,” says John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he was long-time director of the school’s Space Policy Institute.
Nowack disagrees. “From the beginning, we’ve been designing our satellites to be very precise,” he tells TIME. “We want to precisely control where our sunlight is going, and we only want to light up areas that want that sunlight.”
The company’s initial efforts will be modest. The first satellite, named Eärendil-1—after the Old English word for morning star—will shed only as much light as a full moon, across a 6,000-acre area, or about the size of an airport. And that faint illumination will not last long—just five minutes before the satellite, which will be orbiting 400 miles up at 17,500 miles per hour, moves out of range. But if the first launch succeeds, those metrics could change fast. By next year, the 36 satellites that are projected to be aloft will be able to reflect down the equivalent of nighttime street lighting, with multiple mirrors at different spots in orbit cooperating to provide 2.5 hours of light. The 5,000 satellites planned for 2030 will produce the equivalent of daylight for a few minutes at a time, the equivalent of indoor lighting for up to two hours, and all-night street lighting. And the 50,000-strong flock in 2035 will produce an as-yet unspecified number of hours of daylight illumination and ‘round the clock indoor-level lighting to customers who request it.