Prof. Sam Lawler
GREAT guess I'm not going to sleep tonight either. Maybe there will be auroras. I need to enjoy the night sky as much as I can now, I guess.
Fuck you, FCC, for approving this. Fuck Reflect Orbital and all the copycats it's going to spawn. Fuck techbros everywhere. Fuck venture capitalists for funding this destructive, useless bullshit.
Prof. Sam Lawler
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK NOOOOO
Prof. Sam Lawler
Want some reminders of how fucking terrible this idea is?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/true-cost-solar-power-night-reflect-orbital/
https://darksky.org/news/organizational-statement-reflect-orbital/
Journalists: please write about how dangerous this is.
Lawyers (especially if you're based in the US): please help fight this, it will take legal action now
Elena Rossini 🌈
@sundogplanets the stuff of nightmares: “But to expand the technology, Reflect Orbital envisions operating over 50,000 satellites by 2035.”
Americans aren’t the only people inhabiting this beautiful planet and the Earth isn’t flat, surely people and institutions from other countries can pick up a fight and resist this monstrosity - considering it would affect everyone. Right, right?
Prof. Sam Lawler
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)
Prof. Sam Lawler
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)
Prof. Sam Lawler
A New York Times journalist just interviewed me about Reflect Orbital! And I've got an interview for Scientific American set up for Monday. Excellent.
Prof. Sam Lawler
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. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vqtp5dj2o6rqnge56sz2db5a/post/3mq7fzllgw22h
And tomorrow, we're going to run out of satellite catalogue numbers, Y2K in orbit: https://celestrak.org/
Time to go for a walk in the woods...
Prof. Sam Lawler
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)
Prof. Sam Lawler
RE: https://beige.party/@adub/116896129245194088
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: https://linktr.ee/kpcnz
Prof. Sam Lawler
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.
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