Startup Wants to Put Ads in Low-Earth Orbit to Ruin the Sky for Everybody

We've looked at various ways to assault address captive audiences, from advertising above the dentist's chair to holograms of Jeff Bezos' disembodied head appearing over sporting events but this may be the ultimate.

From ScienceAlert:

Will there be no end to people trying to muck up the night sky? Around this time last year it was a disco ball sent into low-Earth orbit. Now a Russian startup has had the colossally dense idea of sticking beaming billboards up there, to shine advertising back down to Earth.

Putting aside the fact that advertising is already ubiquitous, the notion of adding a significant source of light pollution to the night sky has astronomers - professional and amateur alike - fuming.

The startup is called StartRocket, and it hopes to use an array of tiny cubesats to create a programmable display in the night sky.

Orbiting at a low-Earth altitude of 400-500 kilometres (248-310 miles), according to the startup's website, these satellites would each bear a collapsible sail that is capable of reflecting the light of the Sun to form a single pixel.
Because it would be dependent on the Sun, it would only be able to display at dawn and dusk.

All up, the "billboard" would have an area of 50 square kilometres (19 square miles). This Orbital Display, as it is being called, could then be programmed to display logos to people around the globe, for 6-minute intervals, around 3 or 4 times a day - theoretically, at least.

"We are ruled by brands and events," project leader Vlad Sitnikov told Futurism....

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