In 1993, Mike Lawson, an aerospace entrepreneur based in Roswell, Georgia, unveiled his vision for a brave new future of advertising: space billboards.
This wasn’t a half-baked scheme: Lawson had meticulous plans for a proposed 1996 launch: His team of engineers would shoot a package of tightly-wound mylar into orbit about 180 miles above the Earth. Once there, the material would unfurl into a thin, reflective sheet up to a mile long and a quarter mile tall, bordered by a series of mylar tubes which would inflate to create a rigid frame holding the mega-banner taut. The sheet would catch the sun’s rays, amplified by a series of small mirrors attached to the platform, and reflect them into the atmosphere. This would create a roughly moon-sized image in the sky of whatever single design the team printed on the banner. It would probably just be a big company logo, Lawson admitted, as the visual would be a little too low-res to read any ad copy without the aid of a telescope. But as it orbited the Earth, the image would reach every corner of the globe, about 10 minutes a day per location.
When the Associated Press, the first outlet to report on the proposal, ran Lawson’s plan past NASA, the agency said it didn’t see any technical flaws. “It’s very feasible,” Lawson told San Francisco Examiner science reporter Keay Davidson a couple days later. “We could fly [McDonald’s] Golden Arches in space.”
The history of space advertising
The general concept of advertising in space was already well established by 1993. Sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke sketched out visions of extraterrestrial ad campaigns in the 1950s. The entrepreneur Robert Lorsch pitched Congress on using corporate sponsorships on rockets and crew uniforms to facilitate NASA’s work in 1980. And in 1990, the Tokyo Broadcasting System launched a reporter into space on a Soviet rocket, festooned with ads from nine corporations, to promote the Japanese station’s service through nightly transmissions from the Soviet Mir Space Station.
Even before Lawson’s space billboard idea came about, his company, Space Marketing Inc. (SMI), founded in 1989, was already working on advertising campaigns with NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency—including one for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Last Action Hero, slated to launch (literally) in 1993. Arnie’s flick outbid Jurassic Park, paying SMI and NASA an estimated $500,000 (about $1.12 million in 2025 dollars) for the right to plaster ads on a Conestoga, the first privately-funded launch rocket model, and its boosters, and do a press event at the launch.
Some folks weren’t wild about the idea of commercializing the noble endeavor of space exploration. But in the twilight of the “greed is good” era of Reaganite privatization, the world seemed to accept a degree of space-based PR.
The public’s reaction to a space billboard
Still, Lawson’s idea of putting a moon-sized advert into the sky seemingly crossed a line, as the proposal sparked a substantial wave of backlash against him and the eleven firms he claimed had expressed interest in advertising on his rig. Much of the pushback flowed from a gut-level distaste for the idea of spoiling the night sky with something so commercially crass—and in the process creating a world where ads are so large and pervasive they become unavoidable.
“A lot of people want to look at the night sky and not see an ad for soda,” explains Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz, an expert on space law who’s written about issues with space advertising.
Astronomers like Carl Sagan, who called the billboard “an abomination,” took particular issue with the light pollution it would create. Sagan and other researchers and environmentalists argued the billboard would render ground-based optical research functionally impossible.
As a coalition of activists formed, proposing boycotts and picketing Lawson’s Space Marketing Inc., company reps tried to push back on this outrage, stressing that their plan was actually, above all else, an environmental venture. The rigid mylar tube platform, conceptualized alongside a team of academics, would contain instruments designed to monitor atmospheric ozone levels; the ads were just a means of defraying costs. (As the platform would cost $15 to $30 million, they reportedly planned to charge $1 million per day for an ad—a bargain for a brand to rival the moon.) The billboard would only stay in orbit for 30 days, they added, before detaching from the frame. It would burn away as it fell back to Earth, while the ozone-monitoring component would circle the planet, unobtrusively gathering data, for another 11 months.
Reps also seemed to walk back Lawson’s earlier ballyhoo, floating the idea of projecting only conservation messages rather than symbols of corporate greed and ambition. “We will not allow it to be giant beer cans or golden arches,” one spokesperson promised. “Our hope is it will be some sort of environmental symbol,” like a pale green dot reflecting a tree-hugging message to Earth.
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The end of Lawson’s space billboard
But despite SMI’s best efforts at spin, the project fell apart within a year. Technical issues likely contributed to this failure. “We didn’t have access to the low-cost launch platforms that exist now,” explains John C. Barentine, an astronomer and prominent anti-light pollution activist. Barentine stresses that he’s not an engineer and never saw any concrete plans for the billboard. But he’s also pretty sure that “even at the time, the amount of space debris in orbit around the planet would have shredded the reflective material [it used] in short order.”
However, retrospective assessments suggest that public backlash forced potential advertisers to rethink the balance of brand exposure versus reputational risk inherent in the project. The loss of potential funding made it functionally impossible for Lawson to take even a wild stab at the project.
How lawmakers protected space from ads
Determined to make sure no one would ever try to deface the stars with ads again, America’s legislators slowly crafted a law banning “obtrusive space advertising.”
“What should we say to the parents of this nation when they have to explain to their children why the hemorrhoid ointment advertisement is next to the moon or the sun?” Susan Molinari, a member of the House of Representatives and a proponent of a space advertising ban, quipped during a 1993 hearing. “There will be no more romantic moonlit strolls or breath-taking sunrises…And no longer could we look to the heavens for unadulterated inspiration and comfort.”
Lawmakers settled on a rule banning launch licenses to anyone who planned to send an ad platform into space. Bill Clinton signed the proposal into law in 2000, and a United Nations resolution echoing similar sentiments, albeit with fewer enforcement mechanisms, passed in 2001.
However, the furor around Lawson’s space billboard didn’t stop his extraterrestrial advertising career. He later worked with companies like Pizza Hut on a series of stunts and commercials, most created in collaboration with Russian space missions. Most (in)famously, he helped the Hut film the first-ever pizza delivery (of “a six-inch salami pie”) to the International Space Station in 2001. He also worked on space education exhibits and outreach programs well into the late 1990s, before pivoting into blimp tech.
Dreams of a space billboard live on
But Lawson’s failure didn’t kill the wider dream of a space billboard. Notably, in 2019, StartRocket, a small Russian space firm, claimed it was working on a new version of the concept, with plans to project an ad for a gamer-targeted Pepsi energy drink into the sky. Rather than use a giant mylar sheet, the firm explained, they’d deploy a constellation of tiny “CubeSats”— hopefully by 2021. Each would act like a 30-foot sunlight-reflecting pixel, and maneuver into formations as they orbited Earth to create a series of simple visual displays, similar to those you might see at a drone light show.
Pepsi quickly claimed this was all a big misunderstanding, and they never had any such plans—and then the Ukraine war disrupted StartRocket’s operations for a time. But in 2022, the startup touted a feasibility study suggesting they could offer ad space for less than the cost of a Super Bowl spot. Their ads will only be visible at dawn and dusk in areas that already have high levels of light pollution, the firm swears, and will only stay in orbit for a few months for minimal impact. As of 2025, StartRocket is still looking for investors—but claims it’s actively assembling its satellite array at a site in Malaysia, and hopes to launch in the near future.
“Given the comparatively low cost of launches and the amount of venture capital circulating in the space economy, I think something like a billboard project akin to the Space Marketing design is certainly more feasible now than it was 30 years ago,” acknowledges Barentine.
And Gabrynowicz, the space law expert, points out that America’s anti-space advertising law left space for new attempts—by failing to fully define the term “obtrusive.” International law’s restrictions on space ventures, she adds, leave it to each individual nation to actually implement those rules.
Over the last year, astronomers have again mobilized to try to quash StartRocket’s new space billboard project—and put even more stringent space ad restrictions in place. They argue the risks of generating space debris and interfering with astronomical observations and instruments have only grown more dire with time.
“Because of the consequences of the increase in space traffic,” argues Piero Benvenuti, an astronomer and steadfast critic of space advertising proposals, “the only rational decision should be to use space only for applications that offer a unique benefit to humanity.”
“We—or at least those of us who still have a sense of responsibility—know that space is a precious resource for the benefit of society,” he adds. “And as such, it must be protected.”
Unfortunately, Barentine admits, “some believe there is a high return-on-investment to be realized” in a space billboard, potentially beyond Lawson’s wildest dreams circa 1993.
“The lure of that money is so great that, certainly, someone will eventually try it.”
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