Plan to create advertising messages in the sky using satellites

Joey Watson: In 1873, a French writer penned a story he called Celestial Advertising. It reads like a work of science fiction.

Reading: Suddenly powerful bursts of magnesium or electric light, magnified one hundred thousand times, starts from the summit of some flowery hillock, the paradise of young couples—some hill, for instance, like our own beloved Montmartre—and these luminous beams, maintained by immense multicoloured reflectors, shoot violently into the depths of the heavens.

Joey Watson: Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam goes on to describe how messages would fill the night skies of the future. And now that future may have arrived. I recently spoke to a Russian entrepreneur named Vlad. Vlad Sitnikov is in charge of Russian advertising firm Now Possible, and he's come up with a bold and controversial new plan.

Vlad Sitnikov: I dreamed about my idea of orbital display.

Joey Watson: Orbital display, or space advertising. Vlad's idea is to spread advertisements, company logos, government messages, anything really, across the night sky using CubeSats, little satellites the size of a shoebox.

Vlad Sitnikov: The weight is 20 Kg.

Joey Watson: These CubeSats each have a reflective sail, all sitting together in an orbital constellation around the Earth.

Vlad Sitnikov: It's like a sail, 10 metres diameter.

Joey Watson: They'll pick up light from the Sun and reflect it back down to Earth. With a few hundred of them all positioned in a grid, light the right combination and you've got yourself an image visible from Earth, about the size of a billboard, moving across the starry night for six minutes.

Vlad Sitnikov: We can change the text, images, by switching on or switching off the reflector of the satellites.

Joey Watson: It's an advertiser's dream, but is it legal, is it technically possible, and would we even want something like this? Let's focus on the technology first. At UNSW in Sydney I spoke to Dr Joon Wayn Cheong. He is a space engineer and he has built a few operational CubeSats of his own.

Joon Wayn Cheong: I think technical viability is there. A good example would be what Planet Labs has done. They have essentially sails that can be used to drag their position in space further to the front or further to the back relative to other satellites in the constellation to control their position in space. So that's been done to a certain extent. And having these sails in space, that has all been done. And the question I guess is then how much investment is needed to have enough of these so that we can actually see a bunch of characters floating in space. Having the commercial viability of it, combined with the cost of manufacturing with it, I question whether there is a good business case for it.

Joey Watson: Vlad reckons it would cost between $10 and $15 for 1,000 people reached, so if his numbers do stack up, to advertise at $10 per 1,000 would mean it would cost roughly $3.3 million for a six-minute space billboard above all of the US. But Vlad has still got the law to contend with.

Steven Freeland: There have been lots of proposals for various types of advertising, utilising space to project images, using dust off the Moon at one stage to project a soft drink fizz.

Joey Watson: That's Professor Steven Freeland. Steven is the co-chair of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

Your area of international space law doesn't have much to say about commercial proposals like this, but has any individual country outlawed the use of space advertising?

Steven Freeland: The United States has actually passed a law on prohibiting what it calls obtrusive advertising, and its definition of obtrusiveness involves something that creates an image that can be recognised from Earth. For me it's interesting that a country like the United States, which seems to be open to the idea of encouraging entrepreneurship in a whole range of new commercial activities, has actually looked at advertising and restricted it.

Joey Watson: But what about you personally, Steven, do you think it should be outlawed?

Steven Freeland: We need to be careful that we are not moving to a position where we think of space as just something to be exploited all the time without being respected. And it's incredibly important for so many other things; science and exploration and humanity and raising the standards of everybody and disaster management, and all these incredibly important things. So I'd hate it that we began to think of space just singly as something to be exploited.

Joey Watson: But is there any movement to prohibit space advertising at the international level, say?

Steven Freeland: It's more likely that countries would do this in the shorter term than at the international level because doing anything at the international level takes quite a period of time, as you could imagine. We need to reflect on how do we move forward in the next phase of our space activities and in what ways should we regulate what is appropriate and what's not.

Joey Watson: So as far as the law is concerned, Vlad's got the go-ahead, as long as Americans can't see it. He says he has already piqued the interest of major soft drink brands Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and even Qatar has been in touch, looking at the proposal for their upcoming FIFA World Cup. It could all happen much sooner than you think.

Do you have a prospective launch date for your first space ad or message?

Vlad Sitnikov: Yes, at the end of 2021, but I think now it's 2022.

Joey Watson: What would the first projection be when you introduce it to the world?

Vlad Sitnikov: The first that I want to show people on the ground is the peace sign, just because we need to be kind to each other.

Joey Watson: It's a nice sentiment, but one group that might not want to be overly kind to Vlad is astronomers, many of whom have raised concerns about how the projections might obstruct their view of the cosmos. But Vlad says because his satellites are moving, they won't have to worry for more than six minutes at a time.

Vlad Sitnikov: I think they can spend these six minutes just for drinking a coffee.

Joey Watson: The International Astronomical Union has already warned that existing space junk, debris and radio wave emitting satellites may be impeding their ability to scan the sky. So a flashy advertising array like this would likely be a big problem for scientific observations. Despite this, de l'Isle-Adam's story ends with the prediction that space advertising might find a way into our skies.

Reading: Against this system of universal popular information, all competition would be impossible.

Joey Watson: Almost a century and a half later, we'll see if he's right.

Robyn Williams: Well, as Dorothy Parker once asked; 'What fresh hell is this?' And, by the way, she also said; 'If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.' That report by Joey Watson.