I've just had a brilliant idea. NASA could lower its costs by selling ad space on its rockets and space junk around the solar system.
It's not the local exposure, but the eyeballs you're after back on earth - people watching the media. Coke could be advertised on the Mars rover to an interested audiuence for months, or until the batteries ran out, plus have near eternal access to the local market, such as it is.
NASA isn't even marketing the vision they send for merdia consumption.
Magnus - a very good question and I'll try to find out. My previous employer which although little mentioned in the mejia nevertheless launches two or three satellites every six weeks, emblazons their launch vehicles with the logo and name of the organisation, the flags of the member states (all of them) the logo and name of the launcher organisation, and payload information. And as you say it must all weigh something.....
Hmmph. That's the last time I come back from the pub after a Friday lunch and release to the world, via PPRuNe, a truly great idea. As usual, someone's already doing it, although I stand by the product placement angle.
Anyway, now less 'tired' and having given the space business further thought, it has occurred to me that from the solar system's point of view, our quiet little planet fairly recently began sending out artificial electromagnetic signals, first analogue but lately a torrent of digital signals, both data and voice transmissions. What's more, our world has been emitting an increasing number of objects, mostly metallic, some returning to their origin, some hitting other planets and other items just zooming off into space, everything transmitting frantiically.
Well, that gave me an idea for a movie blockbustrer.
Think of it... Earth suddenly receives from a very close source a strong radio transmission. It's a Community Policing Unit from Proxima Centauri, hovering near the moon. It's telling us to keep the noise down a bit and to stop littering.
Gentlemen, and whatever ladies may wander in here, I give you...
"The Planet That Wouldn't Shut Up"
Episode 1
(eat your heart out, Loose Rivets)
Earth had no indication they were under space surveillance, and suspected a joke, by the Russians perhaps, or the Chinese.
The Policing Unit explains that while we Earthlings still modulate the frequency and amplitude of oue electromagnetic transmissions, the rest of the galaxy had long ago moved on, well after their early, more primitive signals had gone past us. The new method involved twisting the electron stream instead. Rather than making a target invisible to radar and so on, they'd made the signal invisible. (insert some credible new technology here - )
'We thought you knew about that, Earth', boomed the neighbourhood cops, who had deciphered some of Earth's voice traffic.
'After all,' they said, 'You call it torquing too.'
Drum roll. Space shot.
That gives some idea of the general treatment. I'm thinking Tarentino. Hollywood offers to c/- PPRuNe.
I recall a short story by Isaac Asimov (?) where a satellite was going to release a cloud of paint towards the moon. And then, for a large payment, someone sneaks a stencil into the spray to introduce the logo of a major company (one involved in the manufacture of soft drinks?).
(? Working from memory so not certain who wrote it or when (would be about 50 years ago I read it) and Google isn't my mate any more this afternoon.)
To add. After a bit more, and better, searching it might be 'Buy Jupiter' by Asimov.
Last edited by MadsDad; 10th Aug 2012 at 15:38.
Reason: Found something
Asimov didn't like salesmen. He wrote a great story about an 'accelerator' that was used in sales demonstration to accelerate a billiard ball through the chest of the smart-talking salesman who was ripping off a scientist who was too self-effacing to commercialise his invention.
All I can say is that with my sense of humor, it is a very good thing that I do not work for NASA.
Because on the first Mars lander that NASA sent to Mars, if I had been on that program, I would have had somehow had an empty beer can carried with it, so when the first pictures came back of the surface of Mars, there would have been an empty beer can sitting there in the red dirt.
I recall a short story by Isaac Asimov (?) where a satellite was going to release a cloud of paint towards the moon. And then, for a large payment, someone sneaks a stencil into the spray to introduce the logo of a major company
It Was Arthur C Clarke in "Watch this space" part of his series of short stories "Venture to the Moon "who had the the advertising gimmick. But he had it as part of an experiment to study the tenuous atmosphere of the Moon. Heinlein used lunar advertising in his series of stories "The man who sold the Moon" but he used the threat of having various logos appear on the Moon to raise funds for an expedition to the Moon.
I do remember a Twilight Zone or Outerlimits where an alien book entitled "How best to serve man" is translated just as a bunch of folks are getting on a space ship the last line was something like "it's a cookbook!
