Advertising in Space

July 11 -- Imagine if Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin had made those memorable first footprints on the moon 31 years ago and then, like athletes brandishing their brand-name sponsors, had pulled out a Coca Cola banner and unfurled it for the world to see.

For the cash-strapped Russian space program, the idea may not seem so outlandish. In fact, the Russian proton rocket that will blast off toward the International Space Station early Wednesday morning is emblazoned with a 30-foot tall Pizza Hut logo.

“Pizza Hut has really been relaunching itself for the last couple of years and this is kind of a mythic symbol of what we’ve done with our logo,” says Pizza Hut president Mike Rawlings.

This is hardly the first time space and advertisers have mixed.

Milk And Pepsi

In 1996 Pepsi paid the Russian aerospace program a seven-figure sum to have cosmonauts inflate a man-sized replica of a soda can aboard the Mir space station. In 1997 Russian cosmonauts filmed a commercial for an Israeli milk company aboard the Mir. And back in the early NASA years, Tang capitalized on the fact that right-stuff astronauts sometimes sipped the orange drink in space.

As John Pike, director of Space Policy at the Federation of American Scientists, says about Russia’s advertising in space, “Why not, what the heck, who cares?”

Although NASA has taken steps toward privatizing some of its program — space shuttle operations are now mostly run by an umbrella management group of private companies — the idea of placing ads on its space shuttles hasn’t really flown. Currently NASA does not permit advertisements on its spacecraft.

“The Russians have a perfect right to advertise, “ says Brian Welch, director of media services at NASA. “But for our part, we don’t think it would be the right approach to put corporate logos on U.S. taxpayer-bought spacecraft.”

Some representatives in congress believe NASA is being too closed-minded about the matter.