@TrillionB 50 000 is way too much. It is not up to FCC - it would be actually very powerful weapon, if you concentrated just fraction of those flashes over single spot (it was actually one of secret nazi weapon projects, but they couldn't imagine syncing thousands of small mirrors back in 1940's)

I would argue, that fixed mirror (on GEO or so, so no quick movement, no flashes), illuminating eg. solar power plant in the winter polar night, beyond polar circle, would make certain sense. Or even illuminating city. But not on LEO... and not 50 000 of them! It is not only dangerous, but impossible (mirrors would just collide with lot of space junk).

There should be a way to opt-out from the flashes in your region... and generally, there would need to be extremely tough control, because: it would be a weapon, if it too many flashes overlap. So arms control should be invoked, instead of civil regulations.

In the universe of stupid, this has to be in the top three .. ever.

The only saving grace is that in my gut, I don’t believe it’ll actually work as planned. Hopefully that will be evident with just this first, trial, satellite and they will scrap the whole thing.

Bah.

Yet another article submitted for The Conversation, with some last minute modifications to express how fucking terrible the FCC's decision on Reflect Orbital is, which fit in perfectly with the overall theme of the article.

(How many articles in The Conversation is too many? I think this is my 5th this year. Every single one about different aspects of how techbros are destroying things in orbit)

I just reached out to a bunch of journalists who already wrote about how awful Reflect Orbital is. I hope at least some of them will write more about it.

(Please DM me if you have suggestions for journalists I should reach out to who might be interested in writing about this to a large audience)

Oh fantastic, the FCC approved Reflect Orbital on Matariki. Just to make it more hideously disrespectful to absolutely everything.

Relatedly, I got interviewed months ago as one of 3 experts for this Aotearoa-based podcast that just came out, which talks about Matariki, access to the sky, and how bad the situation is in orbit: linktr.ee/kpcnz

A-Dub 🥝

2026-07-10 14:22:58

As conflicts and division dominate news headlines around the world, Professor Rangi Mātāmua (Tūhoe), said Matariki sends this message:

"Like the ocean connects us, the sky connects us, and we are connected to each other. And these are unusual, difficult times for many of us, we need each other more than we probably understand. We are all related, we come from the same place, and we actually come from the stars." rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/696510/…

Matariki's message for the Pacific: 'We need each other more than we understand'

As New Zealanders celebrate Matariki, a renowned Māori astronomer says the stars are reminding the Pacific region to unite.

^RNZ

@tmanning Reading the article, that's more or less what happened: the FCC looked at the idea and said "It's not our job to make decisions on things like that"

There isn't a regulatory body whose remit it falls under, because nobody thought anybody would be crazy enough to do it.

We're in one of those movies with a dog playing basketball and the referee says "There's nothing against it in the rules"

@sundogplanets, if it works, yes, we want it - focused very tightly on, in some suitable order, the locations of that company and its owners. Make them nice and crispy.

(Obviously, don't actually do that. Just settle for the thought of it.)

NYT: what do you think about Reflect Orbital?
Prof. Lawler: 💩

My prediction.

metalhead.club/@mndflayr/11689…

Juffo-Wup

2026-07-10 15:50:55

Someone should introduce an official "Lawler Scale" to measure how bad a launch is.
And of course it should be measured in FuckYous.

Going through the news of yesterday and today, I think that Reflect Orbital would be in the lead right now with several MegaFucks.

Or would it be SpaceX? Their satellites are probably in the KiloFuck area only, but the sheer amount should push the company into the MegaFuck range, too.

Anyway, they surely deserve each single "fuck you" that they get!

♲ @sundogplanets@mastodon.social:

I had 3 hours straight of back-to-back intense meetings on various aspects of satellites destroying astronomy with different groups of people. This dishcloth I knitted during the meetings expresses my sentiment perfectly.

Reflect Orbital is going to launch a giant fucking mirror into orbit.

SpaceX has asked to launch a million gigantic fucking orbital data centers, and they've already got 11,000 sats in orbit.

The UN website that allows everyone to see what new satellites have been launched has not been updated since February. fed.brid.gy/r/bsky.app/profile…

And tomorrow, we're going to run out of satellite catalogue numbers, Y2K in orbit: celestrak.org/

Time to go for a walk in the woods...

We presume that new satellites will use identifiers that follow the Orbit Mean-Elements Message (OMM) spec., of the form YYYY-NNNP{PP}, that provide a much larger range of values.

And TLEs will be replaced by OMMs.

celestrak.org/NORAD/documentat…
ccsds.org/Pubs/502x0b3e1.pdf

Looks like even older satellites have been assigned the new format OBJECT_ID aka International Code.

E.g., Starlink-1269 launched in 2020 has ID 2020-012V.

n2yo.com/satellite/?s=45197

Well, I thought this was getting published next week, but it's out now!

Come read about Weird Space Stuff, sponsored by Reflect Orbital and the FCC (who both suck massively)

theconversation.com/a-giant-mi…

Eärendil-1.

yep. yep yep yep. is there something I can smash safely around the house, we need some busted pallets out back or something

Why stop there? A LEO Constellation that sends soundwaves back to Earth of Lee Greenwood's "I'm Proud to Be An American" 24/7 over the Continental United States so you can't avoid patriotism.

I want every LEO scuttled. This was such a bad idea to open to private billionaire use.

@jonny “workers starving, markets so flush with cash that they have to throw it at geo-engineering projects that can’t make money but will upset _every single fucking remaining_ delicately balanced natural system.”

Literally the only reason I’m getting out of bed right now is because I’ve fully internalised the fact we live in a knockoff version of Cyberpunk 2027.

I LOVE waking up on a Saturday morning and thinking about nothing but Reflect Orbital and how to fight it. And then sending lots of emails and texts to my many astronomer colleagues who woke up similarly angry this morning.

The one thing that gives me hope is that 99.9% of people who find out about this react by saying some variant of "Wow that's such a stupid, useless, destructive idea." We have to figure out how to leverage that sentiment.

Fuck you, Reflect Orbital. I will keep fighting.

Thank you for all that you do about all of that techbro satellite shit going on.

It's catastrophically ridiculous that the FCC seems to be responsible for ALL the world. I can't understand that there's not an international body that governs space.

What we need to do is convince some VCs that there are rare earth elements, gold, platinum, copper, just laying around in orbit.

Do salvage laws apply to orbiting refuse? Satellite capture project to de-orbit and process useful elements out of these abandoned hunks of metal?

Best to ask forgiveness to request permission. Yarrr.

@mhoye @404mediaco Oh that's a great idea, I'll look into how to pitch to them, I love their work!

Or maybe this is how you pitch to them? Hello @404mediaco! Reflect Orbital is dangerous and will change the night sky for everyone on Earth. The FCC approved it for stupid reasons. Want to write about all the reasons it will be dangerous and stupid?