Disgrace Into Space - analysis of commercial and military use of outer space - Statistical Data Included

Ecologist, The, March, 2001 by Karl Grossman

'Children would learn a new nursery rhyme: "Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the mylar." They would make a wish upon a falling billboard,' said Markey, adding: 'We might stand here today and laugh about the notion of enormous billboards floating above the horizon or convince ourselves that it "just couldn't happen". But it left unchecked it might happen. Would companies pay a million dollars a day [the price Space Marketing Inc set] for a single billboard? Already today they might spend half that on a single TV ad. In aggregate, US businesses buy well over $100 billion of advertising annually.'

'If allowed to happen,' Markey declared, 'this scheme would turn our morning and evening skies, often a source of inspiration and comfort, into the moral equivalent of the side of a bus.'

Markey, a leading environmentalist in the US Congress and US Senator James Jeffords of Vermont (a state rare among US states for it bans billboards), introduced the Space Advertising Prohibition Act of 1993.

And environmentalists and astronomers moved forcefully, too. A Coalition Opposing Billboards in Outer Space was formed that included the National Audubon Society, Center for Media Education, Astronomical League, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Scenic America, International Dark-Sky Association, Center for the Study of Commercialism, among other groups. They called Space Marketing Inc's plan 'commercial pollution of space'.

'Americans and other residents of this planet deserve places free of hucksters,' declared Michael F Jacobson, co-founder of the Center for the Study of Commercialism in Washington, DC.

US consumer activist Ralph Nader's network of Public Interest Research Groups launched a campaign called 'Save Our Skies, Ban Billboards In Space.' 'The signs, promoted by Space Marketing Inc,' they noted, would be 'roughly the size of the full moon to an observer on the ground.' They decried 'defacing the heavens with advertising.'

The late Carl Sagan got involved, writing from his Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University that the scheme was an 'an abomination. It is the thin edge of a wedge which may destroy optical ground-based astronomy, the most ancient of the sciences. In the long run it means that there will be no place on Earth safe from advertisers. It opens the door to political, ideological and religious sloganeering from the skies. It is an attack on science, an invasion of privacy for everyone, an aesthetic affront, and a misuse of the engineering talent in the national laboratories'. (A scientist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, which otherwise is occupied with producing nuclear weapons, was listed as involved in the design of the space billboards.)

The University of London Observatory protested saying that the programme would 'open a door which could lead to the most damaging consequences for astronomy' and calling upon the International Astronomical Union to take action. The Union issued a statement declaring that 'the future use of solar reflectors for advertising will fatally damage astronomical science'.