The Russian company StartRocket has found the first client for an ambitious orbital billboard project: the American corporation Pepsi. A giant advertisement in the night sky is planned to be broadcast via satellites.
Annoyed by glowing billboards along the roads hitting your eyes at night? These are still flowers. StartRocket company is going to take outdoor advertising to a literal sense to a whole new level - to raise it into the sky using microsatellites. A whole cluster of cubesats will form, according to the developers, a giant billboard in Earth's orbit, on which advertising will be broadcast from 2021.
And this billboard will shine in the sky like a constellation. The first StartRocket client will be PepsiCo, which is ready to place an advertisement for its power engineer Adrenaline Rush in orbit. While this sounds like a joke or a utopia, Olga Mangova, Pepsi's representative in Russia, confirmed that it is real. “We believe in the potential of StartRocket. Orbital billboards are a revolution in the communications market,”she says.
The advertising microsatellites will receive solar mylar sails that will reflect sunlight back to Earth. The duration of one broadcast of such an advertisement will be up to six minutes, the altitude of the satellites will be from 400 to 500 kilometers. The cost of the contract was not disclosed, but it is known that the eight-hour operation of the orbital billboard will cost $ 20,000. How the soda ad will look is also unclear.
Of course, the plan to advertise in the sky received the expected criticism from various angles. Firstly, no one wants to look at annoying advertisements even in the night sky - there are already enough of them on the streets. Secondly, scientists fear that low-earth orbit will be even less safe and the likelihood of spacecraft collisions will increase significantly. Alexey Skorupskiy from StartRocket replied with “haters gonna hate”.
Alexander Ponomarev