Satellites in low orbit positioning themselves to create advertising billboards in space, visible from major cities of the world.
A study published in the journal Aerospace puts space advertising as a promising but still futuristic concept for outdoor advertising
Some space advertising has already been done, including logos on board a rocket, branded food delivery to the International Space Station and a Tesla launch into the void.
However, a long-term space advertising mission would rely on a complex satellite system orbiting the Earth and demonstrating pixel images to observers on the ground.
An advertisement would appear as a constellation of bright artificial stars formed into an image that can be observed in a clear sky.
The Russian researchers: “Development of such missions has become a point of interest for a few space startups because the approach provides global Earth coverage and thus allows showing an advertisement to regions of high-demand multiple times.
“Despite the fact that there are no successful examples of long-term space advertising missions, there were several attempts to launch them.
“First attempts were carried out in the last century. In 1989, to celebrate the Eiffel Tower centennial, it was planned to deploy a string of a hundred solar reflectors in the low-Earth orbit to form a ring of light, visible throughout the world.”
Another space advertising campaign was dedicated to the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. The idea was to launch a big reflective sheet with a length of a mile and width of a quarter-mile that would be visible on Earth.
There are two major options for producing space advertising in terms of a payload: solar reflectors carried by CubeSats and lasers.
A couple of years ago, a Russian startup, Start Rocket, said it planned to use cube satellites to create programmable displays and charge $200,000 for an eight-hour slot, a lot cheaper than 30 seconds at the Super Bowl for $7 million.
https://www.adnews.com.au/news/super-bowl-ads-going-fast-at-7-million-for-30-seconds
Its plan:
The latest study finds: “An unrealistic idea as it may first seem, space advertising turns out to have a potential for commercial viability.
“We feel obliged to comment on a frequent objection to a space advertising mission, which is the sky pollution that it may cause, thus thwarting the astronomical observations.”
However, the study finds that the best target orbit is near the terminator plane (the area between night and day), allowing demonstrations only at sunrise or sunset and not during the dark of night.
And the target areas will be large cities with a big population, where consumers are concentrated and will attract a high advertising price, possibly based on a standard CPM (cost per thousand).
The study: “The cities typically have permanent light pollution and are not considered as locations for observatories for which the image demonstration can be harmful.”
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