In the this is just nuts category – PetaPixel:  “Picture this: you’re photographing in the middle of the night, it’s dark, and you desperately need light. So, you whip out your phone, open an app, pay some money, and boom, night becomes day thanks to a satellite in the sky that is now reflecting sunlight to your location like a bright full Moon. If this sounds like a dystopian future that will never come, then you’re dead wrong. The United States government has just approved Reflect Orbital’s application to launch a mirror satellite into orbit called Eärendil-1. There has been much opposition and criticism of the decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to greenlight the Californian company’s ambitious project — not least by astronomers who already fret about satellites obstructing humanity’s view of the Universe.

It’s terrifying to me that one country can change the night sky for everybody in the world,” Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, tells The New York Times. “I need access to dark skies in order to do my research. If you’ve got giant mirrors shining down, then we’ve lost that.” About the same size as a bedside table, the Eärendil-1 will orbit Earth about 400 miles from the surface. There, it will unfurl a square mirror that’s almost 60 feet wide. The mirror would then bounce sunlight toward a specified location and illuminate a circular patch about three miles wide. Co-founder of Reflect Orbital, Ben Nowack, says the company plans to charge $5,000 for an hour’s use of one mirror, so long as the customer has committed to using 1,000 hours annually…”