You won’t find a billboard in space… yet.
And the American Astronomical Society would prefer it stay that way, releasing a statement last year encouraging laws be enacted now to prevent “obtrusive space advertising” in the future.
Space advertising…
… comes in two categories:
- Non-obstrusive: Logos or advertisements on space suits, rockets, or other objects. For example, in 2000, Pizza Hut paid ~$1m to put its logo on a Russian Proton rocket headed to the ISS, upon which it delivered a salami pizza to the station’s cosmonauts.
- Obtrusive: Space ads that can be seen from Earth without a telescope or other device. Imagine, if you will, camping in a dark national park and gazing up at the night sky only to see a gigantic billboard for Amazon.
The US has already banned the latter, but that only applies to launches from US soil. Other nations could allow such payloads, which is why the AAS is advocating for an international ban.
Is anyone working toward plastering the sky with spam?
Yes, though no company has any ads ready to deploy:
- Avant Space: a Russian company that launched a small satellite in 2024 to test if groups of satellites could use lasers to project ads in the future, per Space News.
- StartRocket: another Russian company that, in 2019, announced plans to promote a Russian PepsiCo subsidiary’s energy drink using small satellites with reflective sails. That did not happen.
But astronomer James Lowenthal told Gizmodo that while there used to be only a handful of mostly government agencies involved in spaceflight, there are now “hundreds or thousands of private space companies vying for a piece of the space pie,” some of which may be interested in clogging up the night sky with ads.
That may be a lucrative endeavor: A 2022 study estimated that while a constellation of ~50 satellites would cost $65m, it could generate ~$111m in profit across three months and 24 ad configurations.
