Thanks to Tech Crunch for this:
Are people not bombarded by constant ad’s and corporate branding enough???
When it comes to really bad ideas for how to make use of space, it’s hard to beat the notion of turning near-Earth orbit into a venue for advertising. That, however, as TechCrunch reports, was the idea floated in a new study published in the journal Aerospace. The paper proposed lofting 50-satellite fleets that could be arranged in different configurations in orbit, spelling out the name of a product and passing across the sky from horizon to horizon over the course of about three to five minutes, depending upon the latitude from which you were viewing the display.
Each satellite would measure just 1 m (3.2 ft) or so across, but would deploy a much larger reflector once it arrived in space, gathering in sunlight and directing it back to Earth. The fleet would be relatively cheap to produce—just $65 million or so, given the simplicity of the satellites—and could generate about $111m in ad revenue over the course of three months. This is based on a business plan that would require 24 customers to shell out $4.6 million apiece per ad. That compares favorably to Super Bowl ads, which cost about $5 million for a spot that lasts only 30 seconds.
But there are two bits of good news in this very bad plan: First, advertisers might be scarce, as no company wants to incur the ire of ad-sick earthlings who don’t want to see the night sky turned into a commercial medium. What’s more, the low altitude at which the satellites would circle the planet means that the three-month commercial window would be as long as they would last before falling out of orbit and burning up in the atmosphere. That final fiery sky show might be the only stage of the satellites’ lives worth watching.
Original article
https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/05/space-billboards-could-cost-65m-and-still-turn-a-profit/
Constellation of satellites as Outer Space Advertising
