Space mirrors could ruin astronomy — and your eyes

sherburt3

4 times brighter than the moon doesn’t sound very dangerous.

Veedrac

Roughly, these satellites would be as bright as the sun, except at night when you're adapted to dark conditions. With the naked eye it'd just be unpleasant, because the dot is so small and smears out to a lower effective brightness, but through a telescope it's bad enough you could get eye damage fairly quickly. With Starlink, I thought the more extreme complaints were unreasonable — astronomy is important, but it's not so important that marginal costs are unpayable — but with Reflect Orbital we're talking about costs like 'it's sometimes uncomfortable to look at the night sky' where it's really hard to imagine a counterbalancing win.

metalman

space mirrors are perfect as weapons, with ALL of the details worked out in various sci fi, and of course a late soviet experiment that showed the ability to turn night into day for a far northern siberian town without frying anybody, as the device did have focusing capability that they were able to use without any accident, that we know of, and any other testing that may still be secret. of course the ultra cheap defence against this or any space based weapons system is rockets that make orbit with 50tons of crushed rock and gunpowder as a payload, and just render leo as a satelite shredder zone for the next 25 years, and there are very few countrys that could not do this on short notice, so play nice everybody as the endless rationalisations for better nastier weapons will run up against ,as the french say " the argument that ends all discussion"

Ancalagon

ground-based lasers to combat these?