Look up at the night sky in 2020 and you might see an ad for McDonald’s floating among the stars. A startup is working on a project to use a constellation of tiny satellites to create glowing ads. The satellites would light up different messages for up to six minutes at a time at about 250 miles above Earth.
As if we’re not already bombarded enough by ads. TV, radio, smartphones, newspapers and magazines, movie theaters, billboards — all of them feeding us with a steady supply of messages designed to influence our purchasing choices, among other things. Now a Russian-based startup has a plan to use constellations of tiny satellites to fill the sky with brightly lit ads from hundreds of miles up.
Think about it. You’re gazing dreamily out of the window at night, enjoying the beauty of a starry sky, only to find Cassiopeia obscured by a McDonald’s ad offering two for one Big Macs in a limited-time promotion.
StartRocket, the team behind the wacky-sounding idea, believes it will have its kit ready by 2020, with contracts offered to corporate customers soon after.
