Space advertising could outshine the stars—unless it’s banned first

||| FROM SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN |||

Imagine stepping outside to stargaze on a clear summer night, only to see no stars but rather the garish glow of advertisements streaming across the sky.

This seemingly science-fictional scenario isn’t actually implausible: private companies are inching closer to launching swarms of tiny maneuverable satellites to create billboardlike displays big and bright enough to be seen from the ground. Prohibitive launch costs and nascent satellite-positioning technology have historically hindered this sort of celestial drone show, but last April the Russian start-up Avant Space announced it had successfully deployed what it billed to be the “first space media satellite” into Earth orbit. The prototype was a technology demonstration for a planned fleet of small, low-cost, laser-equipped satellites designed to emblazon Earth’s sky with corporate logos, QR codes and other consumer-culture ephemera.

The suddenly all-too-real prospect of large-scale space advertising prompted Piero Benvenuti, former general secretary of the International Astronomical Union, to raise the issue in February during a subcommittee meeting of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), the United Nations body that governs the use of space for peace, security and development. Benvenuti urged delegates from 104 member nations, including Russia, to ban obtrusive space ads, warning that such displays could otherwise become “the ultimate light trespass” that would ruinously interfere with ground-based astronomy.

“There is absolutely no reason why you should use space in such a useless way to advertise commercials,” Benvenuti says. The U.N. doesn’t regulate space launches, he notes, but it can help establish international norms to prevent any space-based advertising initiatives from gaining momentum. “Our goal on the diplomatic part is to keep the attention of everybody on the issue,” he says.

Artificial Stars in the Sky

In 2020 Russia granted Avant Space a patent for a laser-based technology to project messages, logos and other images for advertisers onto the sky. The start-up plans to soon offer its customers brief, app-based control of a satellite, allowing them to “light [their] own star,” says Vlad Sitnikov of StartRocket, a Russia-based firm partnering with Avant Space. An investor pitch shared with Scientific American shows that the two companies aim to deploy between 200 and 400 laser-fitted small satellites into an orbit roughly 370 miles above Earth’s surface before the end of this decade. Such a swarm could beam ads down toward our planet for potentially hours each and every day. Their vision, Sitnikov says, is “to prove that space is not just for scientists, not just for the military—it is entertainment, too. And people like entertainment.”

“Anton and I, we’re dreaming about this technology,” he adds, referring to Anton Ossovskiy, founder and CEO of Avant Space. “Where there is humanity, there will be advertisements—we want to be the first.”

This isn’t the first time astronomers have sounded alarms about space-based advertising. Light from most any conceivable space ad would need to be sufficiently bright to be visible to the unaided eye—and would thus photobomb any unlucky ground-based telescopes that happened to be in the way. In 2000 such concerns helped to spur the U.S. Congress to pass a federal law that banned the issuance of launch licenses to companies for the purpose of ferrying payloads for obtrusive space advertising. (This law was first introduced as potential legislation in 1993, when it arose on the heels of a proposal by a Georgia-based marketing company to display a space billboard in the then upcoming 1996 Summer Olympic Games.) The recent push for a global ban urges other nations to enact—and enforce—similar laws before it’s too late. Astronomers fear that as space becomes ever easier to access, more companies will follow Avant Space and StartRocket in becoming drawn to the allure of space-based advertising, with few, if any, regulatory limits on their potentially disruptive plans.

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