Since launching in September, the communications satellite BlueWalker 3 has orbited Earth, curled up as if in a cocoon. Now, it has hatched, unfurling an antenna array as big as a highway billboard, its maker, Texas-based AST SpaceMobile, announced today. Astronomers say the satellite’s brightness has spiked by a factor of 40, rivaling the brightest stars in the sky.

“It’s like exactly what astronomers don’t want,” says astronomer Meredith Rawls of the University of Washington, Seattle, who helps run the International Astronomical Union’s Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference. “It’ll show up as a superbright streak in images and potentially saturate camera detectors at observatories.”

Thousands of commercial satellites already litter low-Earth orbit. The 64-square-meter BlueWalker 3 is the largest one yet, considerably brighter than any of the Starlink satellites deployed by SpaceX, says astronomer John Barentine of Dark Sky Consulting. On top of the light pollution, BlueWalker 3 is testing a transmission technology that threatens to trespass into the frequencies used by radio observatories on Earth, he says. “This just fundamentally feels different,” he says. “We’re in new territory here.”

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AST SpaceMobile hopes the satellite will pave the way for the first space-based cellular broadband network, improving coverage by transmitting radio waves directly between satellites and mobile phones rather than relaying signals through cell towers. To reach phones on the ground, the satellite uses a large, reflective antenna roughly the size of a racquetball court that twinkles brightly as it orbits.

BlueWalker 3 is a prototype for a constellation of 168 even larger satellites called BlueBirds. AST SpaceMobile CEO Abel Avellan has argued his fleet, which would pale in comparison with the tens of thousands of planned Starlink crafts, won’t interfere with optical astronomy. But Barentine says even a small crew of these larger, flashier orbiters will obstruct ground-based telescopes’ ability to detect space objects—including potentially hazardous asteroids.

There are even brighter objects in the sky with a history of photobombing telescopes. For example, the International Space Station (ISS) is typically about 40 times brighter than recent observations of BlueWalker 3. But astronomers have real-time access to the precise location of the ISS, allowing them to reorient their cameras or close the shutters when it passes by. AST SpaceMobile has yet to respond to astronomers’ requests to clue them into its satellite’s whereabouts—nor did it respond to a request for comment on this article. “We’re trying to do this in a spirit of cooperation,” Barentine says, “but there are still a lot of companies that we just haven’t heard from yet.”

Optical astronomers aren’t the only researchers threatened. The direct-to-mobile cell service that BlueWalker 3 and its successors aim to provide requires a much stronger beam and broader use of the radio spectrum than existing networks, sparking concern among radio astronomers. On Earth, various regulatory bodies prohibit companies from operating in protected “radio-quiet zones” and from using certain frequencies that radio observatories use to probe the universe. But those regulations don’t apply to space.

“[Direct-to-mobile technology] is something that just shouldn’t happen in terms of radio astronomy,” says Harvey Liszt, a radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “The spectrum use just becomes a complete free-for-all … and at that point, the whole universe is just bright for radio astronomers.”

Liszt and his colleagues filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in December 2020, shortly after AST SpaceMobile proposed testing direct-to-mobile transmission in Hawaii and Texas. FCC ultimately granted an experimental license to BlueWalker 3, but it still hasn’t approved the proposal for the larger fleet of BlueBirds.

The underlying issue, Barentine says, is that policies regulating transmission from space were written in the 1960s, before constellations of private satellites became commercially feasible. “The system that we have right now is not very well equipped to deal with a scenario like this, which is barreling forward at full speed,” he says.

Astronomers are pinning their hopes on extending environmental protections to space. The National Environmental Policy Act requires U.S. agencies to consider environmental impacts before approving projects, but satellite licenses have been exempted because space wasn’t considered part of Earth’s environment. That assumption is now being challenged. On 2 November, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) urged FCC to re-examine how the act applies to satellite constellations. The day after the GAO report, FCC announced the creation of its new Space Bureau and Office of International Affairs. Barentine hopes it’s a signal of “the beginning of a shift in the oversight of U.S. commercial activities in space.”

For now, astronomers must learn to share the skies with the shiny machines. “This is the water we swim in,” Liszt says. “All we want everybody to do is stay in their own lane.”