The following submission statement was provided by /u/Soupjoe5:

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They claim a three-month ad would pay for itself in one month.

Space advertising would cost a lot upfront but wouldn’t be too expensive to turn a hefty profit, according to researchers from the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT).

“As unrealistic as it may seem, we show that space advertising based on 50 or more small satellites flying in formation could be economically viable,” they write in the journal Aerospace.

Space ads: Thanks to cheaper rocket launches and low-cost CubeSats, space is more accessible than ever before, making it easier for scientists, startups, and others to get into orbit — performing groundbreaking experiments in microgravity, for instance.

But the situation is also making space advertising seem viable. The idea is to use CubeSats equipped with sun-reflecting sails as pixels in giant ads, which would be visible to the naked eye below on Earth — kind of like drone light shows.

“Space advertising based on 50 or more small satellites flying in formation could be economically viable."

It sounds like science fiction, but some think it’s becoming a feasible marketing option.

While many have talked about space advertising — including beverage giant Pepsi — no one has actually created one of these off-world billboards, though, so we don’t know exactly how they would work, what they would cost, or whether they’d even be worth it.

Ad it up: The Russian researchers’ new study addresses some of the mystery surrounding space ads.

Based on their calculations, it would cost $65 million to deploy an ad made by 50 satellites equipped with 32-square-meter reflectors — the largest size that’s been successfully deployed on a CubeSat — for 1 to 3 months, including the costs of the satellites, launch, and engineering.

The team then estimated the potential revenue that could be generated from one of the ads.

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