Hi journalists! Before I start targeted emails to journalists I've talked to before, I'm just going to put this out here and see if it works:

Now that Reflect Orbital https://www.reflectorbital.com/ has officially filed to launch their first satellite, does anyone want to write an article about what a stupid, useless, potentially destructive and harmful idea this is? I would be happy to be interviewed about all the ways this is a very very bad idea and why I'm absolutely livid that they're launching.

Reflect Orbital is saying that 30,000 people have requested that they shine a giant light on them at night (bright enough to be incredibly annoying and screw up ecosystems, but not NEARLY bright enough to do anything useful like power solar panels).

I'm betting we can get >30,000 people who DON'T want Reflect Orbital to shine a giant light on them to fill in this survey for the American Astronomical Society: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYW7dw2oGU0y8wyFu-6lA1_aG8o5CiCPUyw8fVWn5uD8x76A/viewform?usp=header

Back to the Reflect Orbital stupidity. A retired physics prof emailed me a paper he wrote back in 2000 with an optometrist about the original Russian Znamya space mirror. https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2000JRASC..94..237L

It turns out that a space mirror is bright enough to potentially cause eye damage if you accidentally look at it with binoculars or a telescope, and is right on the edge of causing naked-eye damage similar to a partial solar eclipse.

Space mirrors are fucking stupid!