In 1945, in the final days of the war in Europe, the German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun was interrogated by US and British intelligence officers about the rocket programme he had overseen. Out of it had come the V2 ballistic missiles the Nazis had used to bomb London and Antwerp. The Americans wanted to know how he and his technical team had made this extraordinary weapon, and how he imagined its future development.
The longer arc of the story is one of the most extraordinary of the 20th century: despite his past as a high-ranking SS officer, and his implication in war crimes, he went on to become a beloved American celebrity and the architect of the Apollo moon landings. But in those days after his surrender, as the second World War gave way to the cold war, he wrote a report at the request of his captors – whom he understood would, if he played his cards right, become his benefactors – about the future prospects of the technology he had pioneered.
At the end of his report, after several more or less sober pages on the development of German rocketry, he let his imagination run wild for the benefit of his military-intelligence readers. Intercontinental missiles, interplanetary travel, wheel-shaped space stations: a whole panoply of speculative technologies is sketched in these pages.
One of the stranger ideas von Braun outlined was a gigantic mirror orbiting the planet, which could be controlled so as to concentrate the sun’s heat and light on selected points of the Earth’s surface, enabling cities to receive full sunlight during the hours of night. Such mirrors, he wrote, could even be used to influence the weather itself, by means of systematic concentration of the sun’s rays on certain regions. Given a large enough mirror, it would even be possible to generate lethal degrees of heat and direct them toward certain spots on the Earth’s surface, making them utterly inhospitable to life.
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Von Braun was drawing partly on an idea from one of his mentors, the rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth, and partly from Weimar-era science-fiction stories. And the idea seems, accordingly, at once horrifying and whimsical. But some version of this technology may be on its way into the world – or, perhaps more accurately, out of it – courtesy of a Californian start-up called Reflect Orbital. The company, founded in 2021 by a former SpaceX engineer named Ben Nowack, designs and produces satellites which, when launched, unfold large mirrors to reflect the sun’s light back on to the Earth’s surface.
Reflect Orbital’s plan is to eventually launch a fleet of 50,000 satellites into orbit. The technology, it says, will allow certain regions to receive daylight around the clock, greatly increasing the capacity of solar farms, as well as providing lighting for rescue workers and fully illuminating city streets.
It’s not the first time such a strategy has been proposed or attempted. Von Braun himself never pursued the plan, committed as he was, in his postwar career, to hunting larger game. But Krafft Ehrlike, a German rocket engineer who worked under him in Nazi Germany and in the US after the war proposed in the 1970s a system of orbiting mirrors to extend daylight hours in northerly cities. He also planned for mirrors orbiting the moon to illuminate planned lunar stations. Neither plan worked out.
In 1993, though, the Russian Federal Space Agency succeeded in unfurling a reflective membrane of some 20 metres in diameter from one of its orbiting spacecraft – a lightweight material originally intended for solar sail propulsion – successfully creating a 5km-wide strip of daylight on to a portion of the Earth’s night-time surface.
The technology works in principle, and is in fact relatively straightforward. But Reflect Orbital’s plan is the first of its kind to be proposed at a large scale. And even if we set aside as primitive superstition the Promethean taboo on stealing fire from the gods, there are quite large, and quite obvious, potential issues – many of which were brought to light when it was revealed last spring that Reflect Orbital was seeking approval for its technology from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
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Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) has deemed the project “unacceptable”, saying it poses a threat to, among other things, the entire science of astronomy. After the company announced its plans, the RAS said in a statement: “Each beam would be four times brighter than the full moon and would also contaminate areas outside the beam. Their planned 50,000 mirrors would make the night sky three to four times brighter. Beside the obvious impact on astronomical observations, damaging the night sky threatens to collapse nocturnal ecosystems.”
According to Dr Robert Massey, the society’s deputy executive director, Reflect Orbital’s mirrors, along with SpaceX’s plans to launch a million satellites into low Earth orbit, would “hinder the right of everybody on Earth to enjoy the night sky,” and “permanently scar the natural landscape”.
Astronomy is not the only area likely to be affected. Airline pilots could be distracted by light from the mirrors, and the disruption to light-and-dark cycles could damage human’s circadian rhythms and interfere with wildlife.
The RAS’s statement ended with an unambiguous appeal: “We hope the FCC wholeheartedly rejects the plans.” It did not. Earlier this month, Reflect Orbital was given US government approval to launch its first test satellite-mounted mirror into low Earth orbit.
The FCC’s decision on Reflect Orbital’s space mirror will presumably be good news for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Their companies SpaceX and Blue Origin are currently seeking the body’s approval for so-called orbital data centres. The idea has been strongly criticised by environmental groups and space experts, who argue that putting data centres in low Earth orbit, in order to provide infrastructure for AI computing, could prove catastrophic for the planet. Pollution from satellites and rockets burning up on re-entry – black soot, rare earth metals, aluminium oxides and other toxic waste – is already accumulating in the Earth’s stratosphere. According to Reynier Peletier, an astronomer at the University of Groningen, the satellites launched to create these data centres would cause severe damage to the ozone layer, and contribute to further destabilising the Earth’s climate.
Elon Musk, of course, is unlikely to be concerned by such things. Musk, who consistently gives voice to the ideology of capitalism at its most heedless and extreme, recently put it as follows: “SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals.”
