In the year 2000, a Russian rocket launched from Kazakhstan carrying one of the first
pieces of the International Space Station into orbit.
Although this may look like a normal rocket launch, on the side of the rocket was a giant
Pizza Hut logo.
This was part of an ad campaign where Pizza Hut paid 1 million dollars for Russian cosmonauts
to eat their Pizza in space and to have their logo displayed on the side of the rocket.
But why don’t we see ads on the side of rockets more often?
In this video, we’re going to look at the unusual history of advertisement in space-flight.
We’re also going to look at why it’s not common and how the future of
low cost rockets might change that.
In the modern world of internet and television, advertisements are everywhere: sporting events,
tourist attractions, movies, transportation.
Anything that attracts a lot of attention will also attract advertisement.
The 2019 Super Bowl was watched by 100 million making the price for a 30 second commercial
around 5 million dollars.
But spaceflight is no stranger to large audiences.
The first Moon landing in 1969 was watched by a record breaking 600 million people and
the first Falcon Heavy test flight was viewed by millions of people online.
Despite the worldwide attention, advertisements never found their way to these important spaceflight events.
Due to NASA being a government agency, it has a restrictive policy which stops astronauts
and other employees from endorsing products.
Since the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, NASA has been sending M&M’s
up to the Space Station for astronauts to eat.
However, instead of referring to them as M&M’s, astronauts have to call them
‘candy-coated chocolates’.
The Science and Technology Institute estimated that NASA could make around 100 million dollars
in revenue if they agreed to do a sponsorship and advertisement deal.
However, this is an insignificant amount when it comes to doing business in space.
The Russian’s on the other hand are far more open to the idea of advertisements.
A Russian Cosmonaut famously hit a golf ball into orbit as part of a paid sponsorship for
a Canadian golf company.
In 1996, Russian cosmonauts took a giant Pepsi can into space to float outside the Mir Space Station
as part of Pepsi’s campaign to make the first commercial in space.
This is nothing compared to what Pizza Hut were planning.
In 2000, they were looking at the idea of projecting their logo onto the surface of
the Moon using high powered lasers.
After discussing the idea with physicists, they realised that the enormous amount of
power and accuracy required to pull this off would be almost impossible and it would require
hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.
Instead, Pizza Hut settled with the idea of displaying their new logo on the side of a Russian Proton rocket.
Apart from this ambitious advertising campaign, rocket companies have yet to open their doors
to the world of sponsorships.
But with the new wave of private companies getting into the spaceflight industry, this could change.
Companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab have drastically cut the cost of launching rockets.
And with the online viewership of these launches growing in popularity, we could start to see
sponsored liveries appearing on rockets, whether we like it or not.
So although the world of advertising has yet to make it’s way into spaceflight,
we can only hope that the first step onto Mars isn’t sponsored by Pepsi.