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Astronomers, environmentalists and consumer groups have joined forces to
fight a plan to put a giant advertisement in space. The ‘environmental
billboard’ is a venture dreamt up by Space Marketing, a company in Georgia
that recently placed an advertisement for an Arnold Schwarzenegger film on
the side of a NASA rocket.

This latest scheme, planned for 1996, would launch a platform carrying ozone
sensing instruments into low Earth orbit – along with an inflatable
billboard sporting the logo of companies sponsoring the project. Catching
the Sun’s rays, the billboard’s reflective material would gleam out a
corporate message as bright as the Moon, reaching billions of people as it
orbited Earth.

Astronomers are not amused. The American Astronomical Society has condemned
the plan, which it calls ‘anything but an environmentally friendly idea’.
The cosmologist Carl Sagan has called the venture ‘an abomination’.

Space Marketing’s billboard would burn up after about a month, and would be
visible only for brief periods each day. But astronomers fear that if more
and more such billboards were launched, and at higher orbits, they would
light up the sky for longer, making observations of faint objects in space
increasingly difficult. ‘This would be the end of any serious attempt to
penetrate to the farthest reaches of the Universe,’ says British astronomer
Derek McNally, who is leading international opposition to the billboard.

Protesters are threatening a boycott of any company that sponsors the
project, and are lobbying for an outright ban on extraterrestrial
advertising.

Space Marketing now says that its platform would gleam out not a corporate
logo but an environmentally friendly green dot, as befits its ozone-sensing
mission. ‘That doesn’t make any difference to us,’ says Peter Boyce of the
AAS. ‘It’s still light. It would still kill us.