The future is incredibly bright for a Russian satellite that is expected to outshine everything but the moon, starting next month.

The tiny Mayak satellite will be be launched on a Soyuz 2.1v vehicle July 14 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, IFLScience reported.

Once in orbit, about 370 miles high, the satellite will unfurl a giant pyramid-shaped solar reflector to shine brighter than any other star in the night sky.

The Mylar reflector, which will span 170 square feet, is apparently 20 times thinner than human hair.

The satellite is expected to shine with a magnitude — a measure of brightness — of about -3.6, making it the fourth-brightest object in the sky after the Sun, the Moon and Venus.

Other reports put it as a magnitude of -10, which would make it even brighter than Venus.

The mission also will serve as a technology demonstration to test how to brake satellites in orbit and de-orbit them.

The project — led by Moscow State Mechanical Engineering University — raised more than $30,000 on Russian crowdfunding website Boomstarter.

But some astronomers point out the dark side of the mission. Many astronomy programs rely on observing the whole night sky, and having an errant star drift across could prove problematic.

“We fight so hard for dark skies in and around our planet,” Nick Howes, an astronomer and former deputy head of the Kielder Observatory in Northumberland, told IFLScience.

“To see this being potentially ruined by some ridiculous crowdfunded nonsense makes my heart simply despair,” he said.

Project leader Alex Shaenko previously told IFLScience that it “will not be a problem,” adding that there “are a lot of spacecraft flying in the night sky, some even brighter than Mayak.”