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For the artist as provocateur, the night sky is an enticingly vast canvas. The latest attempt to make a mark on the heavens comes from Trevor Paglen, an artist known for outsized works that rely on technological innovation.

His new piece, Orbital Reflector, is a giant diamond-shaped balloon that will inflate once it is in orbit around Earth. It is expected to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on 2 December. The 30-metre-long structure is coated in titanium dioxide, which will reflect the sun’s light and be visible to the naked eye from Earth’s night side. After a few months, it will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.

This isn’t the first time something shiny has been sent into orbit. In January 2018, spaceflight firm Rocket Lab launched a geodesic sphere about a metre wide that reflected light as it circled Earth. It was known as Humanity Star, and its creator, Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck, said it was intended to draw people’s eye to the night sky and push them to consider their place in the universe.

Putting eventual junk into space without a scientific or technological purpose has riled up many scientists, who say these kinds of satellites can interfere with their observations of the sky, but the art community ought to be just as vocal. These glittery pieces are not novel or even particularly original. The decades-old Iridium satellites that connect satellite phones also catch the sun’s rays and their glares often reach far beyond the expected brightness of Orbital Reflector.

Some people have likened reflective space art to graffiti, but even that misses the mark. Earth-bound graffiti is subversive by nature, the message part of the medium. There’s nothing all that subversive about spending millions of dollars to buy a spot on a rocket with the goal of getting people to simply look up in the dark.

Artists could be doing much more when it comes to orbital exhibits. Astronaut Chris Hadfield demonstrated the power of creating art in space during his stay on the International Space Station. His photos of Earth’s landscapes revealed an impressionistic view of our home planet, while his cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded in orbit, re-contextualised a classic.

Space art needn’t even reach a large audience.  One of the most moving works beyond Earth is something nearly no one has seen with their own eyes. It is an 8.5-centimetre aluminium sculpture called Fallen Astronaut that sits in a dusty, mountainous landscape of the moon’s northern hemisphere.

The astronaut figurine was made by Belgian painter Paul Van Hoeydonck and placed there by David Scott on the Apollo 15 mission in 1971 to commemorate the astronauts and cosmonauts that died in the course of space exploration. Assuming it isn’t hit by an asteroid, it will stay on the surface of the moon forever – or at least, until the sun expands and consumes the inner solar system, billions of years from now.

As access to Earth orbit grows, it shouldn’t merely be restricted to practical applications like communications satellites and scientific experiments – there is certainly space for artists in space. But twinkly lights just aren’t going to cut it any more.