”Look, Mom! There’s the Big Dipper … and Orion … and Pepsi’s orbiting global advertisement!”
Yes, in the near future you will be able to ignore the magnificence of nature’s cosmic stellar tapestry in favor of the most garish and intrusive advertisements ever in all of history, displayed in near outer space. Stars and constellations are so old-fashioned — thank FSM that our brave new world of capitalism run amok will direct our attention to orbital billboards instead, amirite?
A Russian enterprise, StartRocket, will launch a fleet of thousands of cubesats — miniature satellites smaller than a toaster — into low Earth orbit in 2021. The cubesats will deploy mylar panels that will provide a canvas of roughly 50 square kilometers (19.3 square miles or 538,195,520 square feet) for displaying advertisements directed downward at Earth.
The satellite formation will not be in a stable fixed orbit. The importance of that is that it means it will not hover over a single spot permanently — instead, it will float around the entire planet, due both to its low orbit as well as commands from StartRocket for the fleet to change its position.
The first client to sign up for this astronomical horror is PepsiCo’s Russian division. Its spokesperson explained that innovative beverages merit innovative ways of pushing product awareness, no matter how monstrously they pollute the public commons of the nighttime sky:
“Orbital billboards are the revolution on the market of communications. That’s why on behalf of Adrenaline Rush — PepsiCo Russia energy non-alcoholic drink, which is brand innovator, and supports everything new, and non-standard — we agreed on this partnership.”
As you can imagine, astronomers aren’t thrilled with the idea. Light from cities already bounces up into the atmosphere and interferes with their work. Adding a huge glowing billboard in the sky is just adding insult to injury. Astronomer John Barentine says:
“Every one of those moving blips of light in the night sky is something that can interfere with our ability to collect photons from astronomical sources.”
He also notes that Earth’s orbital space is overflowing with useless debris that poses risks to useful satellites as well as human space flights and habitats like the International Space Station — adding more junk up there seems profoundly unwise. Moreover, a project of that size — 50 square kilometers, if you recall — is so big that it likely would temporarily block or interfere with signals to and from communications satellites and GPS beacons as it passes between them and Earth.
StartRocket doesn’t seem concerned about the effects — both aesthetic and technical — that its project will have on astronomers, communications systems, or awestruck admirers of the cosmos at night. Alex Skorupsky of the company says:
“If you ask about advertising and entertainment in general — haters gonna hate. We are developing a new medium. At the advent of television no one loved ads at all.”
Note that this is just the first such orbital billboard that StartRocket has planned. In time, we could have dozens or hundreds of them from numerous space-advertising companies.
On a final note, Lenin briefly awoke in his tomb and revised his adage to say “The Capitalists will eventually try so hard to sell us rope that it will make us wish to hang them with it.”
Da, comrade.
Tuesday, Apr 16, 2019 · 1:37:46 AM +00:00 · Krotor
Perhaps Pepsico Russia’s spokeperson got too far out in front or perhaps negative publicity is having an effect. Either way, PepsiCo — the international parent corp, which includes its Russian division — has issued a statement:
"We can confirm StartRocket performed an exploratory test for stratosphere advertisements using the Adrenaline GameChangers logo. This was a one-time event; we have no further plans to test or commercially use this technology at this time."
Assuming that’s true, good for Pepsi. But you just know that some other company will nevertheless engage StartRocket for advertising and others are likely to follow.