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Pepsi Says It'll Use an Artificial Constellation, Hung in the Night Sky Next To the Stars, To Promote an Energy Drink (futurism.com)
A Russian company called StartRocket says it's going to launch a cluster of cubesats into space that will act as an "orbital billboard," projecting enormous advertisements into the night sky like artificial constellations. And its first client, it says, will be PepsiCo -- which will use the system to promote a "campaign against stereotypes and unjustified prejudices against gamers" on behalf of an energy drink called Adrenaline Rush, reports Futurism. From the report: Yeah, the project sounds like an elaborate prank. But Russian PepsiCo spokesperson Olga Mangova confirmed to Futurism that the collaboration is real. "We believe in StartRocket potential," she wrote in an email. "Orbital billboards are the revolution on the market of communications. That's why on behalf of Adrenaline Rush -- PepsiCo Russia energy non-alcoholic drink, which is brand innovator, and supports everything new, and non-standard -- we agreed on this partnership."
Go away. Don't pollute our beautiful skies like that.
And on a personal note, if I ever needed a reason to boycott PepsiCo products, there it is.
Brought to you by: "Al"toids - the curiously weird mint.
Dear space organization in India, There is a new target for you. Please fire at will. A space billboard already is space junk.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
This might not go over as well as they think. People are kind of tired of corporations thinking they own everything. I can imagine children interested in science finding it offensive rather that cool. Pepsi has a lot of different products that could be boycotted. I run a planetarium, and I can imagine the shows I could do on light pollution, having a great big orbting billboard to point to as an example of BAD. Right now, everybody has too many bright lights. Nobody's head stands head and shoulders above the rest as offensive. But when Pepsi puts their name on a billboard, I have a bad guy to memorialize forever. It'd be terrible, but it'd be great for Pepsi to bring a whole world of opinion down upon their head as enemies of the night sky.
Didn't we have ads in the 20th century?
Well, sure, but not in our stars. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in stars. No siree!
I'd love to see this. It's a pretty neat technological achievement if it works. So yea, I say do it. Show the world what it's capable of so we can all see it. I think it would be pretty damn neat to see.
Then ban the shit out of it at the international level and force them to de-orbit their sats, so we don't have to ever see it again. Once was plenty.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Suddenly a joke from the space race era gets new merits:
"What if the Russians get to the moon first?"
"They'll probably paint it red."
"So we have to hurry!"
"Relax. If they do, just send up a crew with loads of white paint and have them write "Coca Cola" across"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They looked on the beautiful night sky, pointing out to each other the constellations they knew, admiring the band of the Milky Way as it swept across the inky night sky.
But all go things must come to an end, they had to get up early to polish the shipping drones for tomorrows run. They stood up, and removed the augmented reality goggles.
Looking up again, one of them thought he could maybe see Orion peeking out from behind the neon cup-o-noodles constellation and northen lighting shading effects, but then it was gone as the remaining colors of the night sky washed over his eyes competing for attention.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In _The Man Who Sold The Moon_ the idea was to go to the (thinly disguised) Coca Cooa company and sell them the rights to turn the moon into a billboard - a giant bottle cap - by launching small rockets to spread soot to selectively darken the surface.
But the idea was not to actually DO it. It was to NOT do it, and build an ad campaign on how it had bought the rights in order to head off one of its rivals (7 up, also thinly disguised as "6+"). The 7up/6+ logo would be easily readable from Earth, but the Coca Cola / (whatever he called it) was too "busy" to be clear.
7up was independent at the time. But it's now owned by PepsiCo.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I expected better from Slashdot. You're getting trolled, folks. The dimmest object you can see with the naked eye is magnitude +6. Those are only visible in very dark rural areas. In big city suburbs, the best you can see with the naked eye is magnitude +4. A cubesat's reflected sunlight magnitude is typically +10 or +11. Cubesats are only barely visible to a very large telescope when illuminated solely with sunlight.
Now if each cubesat is an active light emitter, that's a whole different thing. Let's say it's primarily solar powered. Let's further say Pepsi spends $BIG_NUM on 44% efficient multi-junction solar cells. If 3 of the 6 faces of the cube are solar cells, that's 300 square centimeters of solar cell. Solar irradiance outside atmosphere is 1367 watts per square meter. 300 square centimeters is 0.03 square meters. 1367 * 0.03 * 0.44 = 18.04 watts. Let's say the other 3 faces of the cube are LEDs. 18 watts of LEDs from Amazon gets you 1260 lumens. 1260 lumens from 0.03 square meters is 42,000 lux. That's like a tiny spot of direct sunlight as seen from Earth. That's pretty good, though the angle at which it's visible is limited by altitude and it having only 3 illuminated faces. There's no image whatsoever. It's just a bright spot.
These are all best case numbers, of course. In reality the three faces of the cube won't operate at maximum efficiency since they can't all face the sun directly at once, and in LEO they don't see sunlight at all for half their orbit, etc etc. Still, if they worked at it, it could be pretty obnoxious.