THERE ARE NO BILLBOARDS IN SPACE

THERE ARE NO BILLBOARDS IN SPACE

Last week the Cassini spacecraft beamed photos back to earth speeding 898 million miles away from the surface of our planet.  The spectacular images show the Earth and our moon as tiny specks in the distance beyond Saturn's rings.  Like people around the world, I marveled at the beauty of the pictures and the emotional power of viewing the earth from this new perspective.

But at the same moment, I felt that something was missing from the composition.

Then the answer hit me with a one-two punch of astonishment and embarrassment.  What I wanted to see in that historic photograph was a logo.

Get past your outrage for a moment and consider that our space program embodies desirable qualities sought after by advertisers worldwide.  It represents boldness, audacity, precision, grand ideals, technical excellence, virtuous objectives and has global appeal.  These are all qualities that can be marketed successfully by NASA while maintaining total autonomy for their mission.

Art museums were long thought to be bastions of artistic freedom that shunned corporate dollars for fear of undue influence on artistic decisions.  Today, museums around the world seek out corporate sponsorship as a way to defray costs of blockbuster exhibitions and help secure financing for ongoing operations because public funding is inadequate.  A current trend takes that one step further with corporations creating curated museum shows that are sent to arts institutions around the country at nominal or no cost to the museum in return for appropriate branding opportunities.  Although the fine art/corporate sponsorship relationship has in some ways realized the worst fears of arts purists, overall more quality art that would otherwise never be accessible to the public is able to be seen and appreciated.

Today there are several private commercial firms operating in space like SpaceX handling the now mundane and conventional task of hauling satellites into orbit.  Advertising is certainly a part of their marketing plan.  NASA is different because it concentrates on projects that would otherwise never be commercially viable -- the pure scientific pursuit of knowledge about our planet, our origins and the unknown.  That is an opportunity for the very few global corporations that would compete for the exclusive rights to market certain images with NASA being the direct financial beneficiary.  Click here to start the bidding for these planned future NASA missions.

So you would still be able to see the incredible image we saw last week.  And also another one of the same image with a small Redbull banner protruding from the fuselage in the corner of the picture.  Properly managed, the benefits to our space program would far outweigh any potential cost.

Over and out.