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FCC approves giant space mirror as astronomers warn of risks to the night sky
(www.thebrighterside.news)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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And while we’re at it let’s just push even more shit above the earth because there’s totally not already a whole bunch of stuff up there.
Well, technically there really isn't much up there now.
I mean in low earth orbit it's what, 99.999999999999999999999 % empty space? With the tiny fraction left being satellites.
By that logic you wouldn't mind if I loosed a bag of mosquitos in your house, would you?
I love this comment so much and I love “loosed” as a past tense verb even more.
Well let's run with that. If you put a single mosquito in my house, I would have a higher ratio of mosquito to air than low earth orbit currently has in its ratio of satellites to empty space. (Seriously)
It's easy to remove any number of mosquitos from your house, 1 person and a swatter can get it done. It's incredibly expensive, laborious and dangers to remove LEO satellites. If something malfunctions then it's essentially a stuck there until shot or nudged down.
Well, it wasn't my metaphor, I'm not really defending it.
That said, you do seem to have missed the point of a metaphor. Nobody is arguing that mosquitos in a house are more of a problem than satellites... Comparing the two directly was not anyone's intention.
Sure it wasn't a great comparison in the first place. What I'm trying to communicate is that astronomers already have to deal with space trash as is, it's a legitimate problem to their observations. Having a giant object to reflect potentially, and without constant upkeep certainly, become especially large space trash. Removing faulty equipment is already an inefficient expensive process. Everything becomes depreciatied at some point. I'm just hoping if this type of project comes to pass that it also has an plan in case of accident or insolvency.
There's actually a rational reason to not worry about LEO space mirrors becoming potential space junk. They just have an extremely high surface area to weight ratio, meaning they're going to experience relatively high drag. If something like this is abandoned in low earth orbit, it would probably deorbit relatively quickly, like in a matter of months.
I'm not suggesting that this mirror is a good idea, it's unclear what the use case even is. But I am saying that it's not any more dangerous than any of the dozens of smallsats launched by University robotics programs. People don't tend to have any problem with that kind of satellite, though they're probably more likely to be abandoned relatively quickly and they would stay in orbit longer than a satellite that has what is essentially an enormous sail.
That's disingenuous though. You have to compute the orbital tube volume to account for the collision risks.
Yeah that's true, calculating the actual collision risk is a whole different thing.
It was really just a joke, cause you know space is bigger and more empty than most people realize. Because what I said was "technically" true, if not super meaningful in any way.
That said, orbit isn't too crowded yet, more is definitely going up, a lot more. Truth be told, 50 years from now, the number of satellites orbiting earth could easily be in the hundreds of thousands.
We're at what, close to 20k right now?
Won't take 50 years.
And not every orbit is equally useful. Near misses are getting more frequent, and it only takes 1 to start a chain reaction.
But a chain reaction in low earth orbit is generally short lived, atmospheric drag clears that up. A chain reaction in high earth orbit is exponentially less likely to happen. It's the medium orbits to worry about, luckily they're less popular for now, but as LEO fills up, they'll likely start to be used more.
Even if short lived it would still be devastating.