About twenty years ago, a company called Space Marketing, Inc. had a plan for “space billboard” satellites—basically, a mile-long mylar banner that would be unfurled in Low Earth Orbit. Printed with a distinctive logo licensed by an advertiser, the thing would appear to be about a third the size of a full moon to an observer on Earth, and would reenter the atmosphere and burn up after a few weeks.
For various reasons, including threats of legislation, the project never got off the ground.
But my question is…what would the mass of such a billboard have been?
What technical information I’ve been able to glean from various sources online say that the billboard would have basically been something resembling a “life raft”—a one mile long, 1/2 mile wide mylar sheet, bordered by an inflatable mylar “tube.” When the tube was inflated, it would stretch the billboard out to full size.
My problem is that I have no idea how much that much material would mass, even a ballbark figure, let alone how much mass the non-billboard equipment of the satellite would take up. Space Marketing Inc. never even had a potential launch vehicle selected, AFAIK.
So, I’m asking anyone with a better handle of the subject than I…what would have been the approximate launch weight of the Penultimate Pepsi Ad?
From here, .06mil mylar weighs 7/1000 of an ounce per square foot. A 1/2 mile square piece of this would weigh 5280 * 2640 * .007 = 97,574 ounces or 6,098 pounds - around 3 tons. Figure on around twice that for the edges and miscellaneous material, so 6-10 tons.
So figuring 6 to 10 tons, the price tag is roughly $120 to $200 million dollars just to put the sign up into orbit. That doesn’t include the cost of developing and building the sign itself.
That’s NASA’s cost. The Ukrainian Zenit 2M is $1500 per pound to orbit putting the launch cost at a more reasonable $30 million. $30 million is not that much compared to the media buying costs of major ad campaigns. It’s probably only a matter of time before some company attempts this, even if the launch failed they’d still get a huge amount of press coverage from being “the first” to hang a huge banner in space.
Why, causing stars to go supernova, so that they spell out “COME ALIVE WITH PEPSI!” in the sky as seen from Earth, for several weeks, bright enough to be visible even in daylight.
Well, why all the bother of an orbital launch? Wouldn’t it be simpler (simpler not easy) to raise a really large balloon-based system to 100K feet or so? (Like they did for the Felix Baumgartner jump.)
They’d have to pass through the navigable airspace on the way up, but once there it shouldn’t be a threat to aircraft.
It wouldn’t orbit but just being up there for a while would get a lot of visibility.
It’s not about the visibility. It’s about the secondary publicity. “Pepsi flies high-altitude balloon!” Ho hum. “Pepsi puts billboard in space!” Front page news, Buzzfeed alerts, retweeted endlessly, etc.
Don’t get it.