Could a private co. turn the Moon into billboard?

[pesch]

Of course, it’s only a coincidence that the language used to write the programs for the shuttle chose high-order assembly language / shuttle, better known as HAL/S.

pesch

[Evnglion]

Wow, this is really coinsidental. The other day, Sunday, April 1st actually, I was listening to NPR on my way home. The newscaster said that some company was going to start using the moon as a billboard using giant lasers starting that night. I looked for it, but I am assuming that it was an April fool’s joke. ::I just thought I would let you guys know that they said that ::

[Phobos]

*Originally posted by Cabbage *
**A few years ago Pizza Hut had the idea of projecting their image as an advertisement on the moon. They abandoned it once they discovered it would have to be the size of Texas, and put their logo on a rocket instead. **

I heard this too. Except that I heard that they wanted to engrave the logo with a laser. Anyone have the Straight Dope?

Originally posted by Podkayne
A lot of people would be extremely pissed if the Moon was emblazoned for all time with a corporate logo.

I would be one of those people.
(not to mention that the life of the logo would be about a million times longer than the life of the company that put it there)

[CalMeacham]

Heinlein
I believe the story you are thinking of is: “The Man Who Sold the Moon” by Robert A. Heinlein.

In the story, he proposes two possibilities: A company would help finance a trip to the moon and would get the advertising rights to the surface. It’s not really so farfetched. Expensive, true, but think of the exposure!

Actually, there WAS another science fiction story about advertising on the moon written in the fifties – it was by Arthur C. Clarke, and it appears in one of his short story collections (Expedition to Earth? The Other Side of the Sky?) I don’t recall the title, but in the storysomeone sabotages an experiment so that a giant, glowing logo appears on the moon. Clarke never explicitly says whose logo it is, but by implication it’s clearly “Coca Cola”.

Then, of course, there’s the Isaac Asimov short story "Buy Jupiter (in the collection of the same name) about aliens advertising on our planets.
And, for the record, Galactus never tried to write on our moon, although in the TV series “The Tick” Chairface Chippendale got as far a “CHA” with his super-laser before The Tick stopped him. The Tick later erased the “C”, and the parody version of Galactus took a bite out of the moon. (One of the things I love about The Tick is the continuity – after that Chippendale episode, every time you saw the moon you saw that “CHA” carved into the side. Until the pseudo-Galactus episode. Then you saw “HA” and a nibble.)
Why do I remember this stuff instead of useful things?

[Podkayne]

Do I win the SDMB Obscruity Prize for the day?

Fenris’ Law: Any discussion of Science-Fiction will inevitably end up discussing Heinlein.

From the Who’s Your Favorite BAD SF Writer? thread.