In the latest scheme of the booming private space industry, a Japanese company proposes to light up the night with made-to-order shooting stars. But some experts worry about space clutter, and the scary consequences of these artificial meteors hitting important satellites.

ALE Co., Ltd. / Via star-ale.com Artist's depiction of an a artificial shooting star sky show.

If everything works out, the night sky over Hiroshima, Japan, will fill with the graceful arcs of blue, green, and orange shooting stars sometime in the summer of 2019. The fireworks will come courtesy of a satellite some 220 miles high, owned by the world’s first “aerospace entertainment” firm, Astro Live Experiences, or ALE. The brainchild of University of Tokyo astronomer Lena Okajima, the spacecraft will circle the globe and kick out 15 to 20 small metallic pebbles on command. Those seeds, less than half an inch wide, will blaze overhead for a few bright seconds over the city of the buyer’s choice.

“We want to provide meteor showers on demand.”

“We want to provide meteor showers on demand,” Josh Rodenbaugh, a member of ALE’s satellite operations team, told BuzzFeed News. Their customers could be cities, companies, amusement parks, the mega-rich — anyone who can pay for such a spectacular show. Rodenbaugh declined to cite a specific cost, except to say that it would be less than the massive fireworks displays that major cities use to celebrate holidays. (Tokyo's fireworks displays run around $40,000 a firework, according to Rodenbaugh. “We feel we can be under that number.” New York’s 4th of July festivities run around $6 million.) Originally conceived as an opening act for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the “Sky Canvas” project has blossomed into a glamorous harbinger of the new entrepreneurial era in space. But some satellite experts question the logic of launching a sandblaster into orbit, given the risk that its projectiles might collide with any of the thousands of satellites that space firms such as SpaceX will be adding to the same orbit. “I salute them for cleverness and for their technical expertise, but from an orbital debris standpoint, it’s not a great idea,” University of Michigan astronomer Patrick Seitzer told BuzzFeed News. “I’m concerned space will be getting crowded in low-earth orbit in the next 10 years.” Although astronomers originally had some concerns about light pollution from the shooting stars interfering with observatories, Seitzer added, those concerns don’t seem legitimate given the short lives and intended locations of the artificial shooting stars.

ALE Co., Ltd. / Via star-ale.com Testing of a green artificial shooting star.