Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2019

45 MARCH-APRIL 2019 ASTRONAUTICS spread, and that message has to necessarily be so short as to perhaps be ineffective or useless. It is difficult to think of a different application than the purely commercial one for Orbital Displays. The bewildering prospect of seeing adver- tising signs in the twilight sky, as fast as the International Space Station (but up to six times brighter) has already raised much controversy, certainly justified, for other opportunities to implement projects of this kind. A good reason to avoid placing in orbit objects that are substantially useless to the community is that there are already too many. As noted by Patrick Seitzer, pro- fessor of astronomy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and expert in space debris, “Space is getting increasingly crowded. There are over 20,000 objects with orbits in the official public catalog maintained by the U.S. Air Force. Less than 10 percent of those objects are active satel- lites — the rest are dead satellites, old rocket bodies and parts of spacecraft.” This already serious situation is bound to significantly worsen due to the growing use of cubesats, whose number will in- crease exponentially in the coming years. Just to give an example, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, having inappropriately polluted the Solar System with a car and a puppet, has planned the launch about 7500 cube- sats into low Earth orbit. As the astronomer John Barentine (International Dark-Sky As- sociation in Tucson, Arizona, and the Amer- ican Astronomical Society’s Committee on Light Pollution, Radio Interference and Space Debris) points out, advertising dis- plays would not just add trash in orbit and light pollution in the environment, but could also disturb radio signals, creating problems for activities that are much more useful to the space community and society in general. More generally, the whole ques- tion is well-summarized by David Kipping, professor of as- tronomy at Columbia Univer- sity: “This is stupid, vandalizes the night sky and corrupts our view of the cosmos.” Apparently unaware of any reasonable objection, the CEO of StartRocket, Vladilen Sit- nikov, minimizes intrusiveness and the risks associated with his initiative, releasing to his inter- locutors somewhat uninformed statements, as reported by reli- able sources. About advertising, he says: “It’s human nature to advertise everything… Brands [are] a beautiful part of hu- mankind.” With reference to the inconvenience its displays would be to astronomers, Sitnikov mini- mizes: “It’s just six minutes. You can do pee- ing or making your coffee. So it’s a break for you, it’s like we [are] help [ing] them.” How likely is a future invasion of the twi- light sky, then, eventually, the nocturnal sky, by advertising messages? Currently, there are no national and international laws that could prevent such commercial initiatives. The Federal Communications Commission (a US government agency) has recently proposed restrictions on the spread of space junk, but those proposals are not yet law and do not refer to the spe- cific case of orbital advertising. Therefore, from a legal point of view, nobody can pre- vent anyone from implementing projects such as the one proposed by StartRocket. This does not mean that the Russian startup will succeed in its intent. Sitnikov is not an sequence of possible twi- light and night views contami- nated by the presence of the Orbital Displays.