Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2019

MARCH-APRIL 2019 C ubesats, simi- lar to those shown above, will represent the pix- els of brands and logos that the Or- bital Displays project intends to make appear in our skies. [NASA Johnson/Flickr] On the next page, an example of an imaginary trade- mark in transit over Mount Fuji. [StartRocket] have is substantially the same as our most distant ancestors, and we could certainly ap- preciate the fact that the biggest “screen” visible to all mankind is completely free of advertising. However, to someone particularly insensi- tive, all that space “only” filled with stars might seem like a true waste: you could fill it with advertising and make a lot of money. As absurd as it may seem to us, such contam- ination of the night sky could happen within a few years. As early as 2021, one might indeed observe the sky at twilight (both in the morning and in the evening), perhaps to admire a planet, a crescent moon, or a comet, and see suddenly emerge from the horizon a very bright artificial “ce- lestial body” having the shape of a brand or a logo of a famous commercial product. After passing through a more-or-less broad arc of sky, the intruder would vanish. The self-styled Russian aerospace company StartRocket is promoting this worrying ini- tiative, which aims to produce orbital bill- boards by exploiting the design and control of cubesats. Cubesats are satellites of very small size (as big as shoe boxes), which, due to their light weight, versatility, and afford- ability, are proving a growing success both in the scientific and commercial fields. Through a single launch, tens of them can be put into orbit and, apart from some spe-