Ask YC: Moonvertising, is it coming?
There is a billboard in my home town that has a cryptic message about watching the next full moon, and it provided a website to go along with it: moonvertising.com.
It appears that Rolling Rock Beer is behind this somehow. I was curios to see if it was a marketing hoax or if it was actually possible (and going to happen).
My question to HN is this: Is something like this possible? How would it work, and what would be required for it to work? I did some googling and found out that Coca Cola wanted to try this once but was prohibited because of the risk of the lasers blinding pilots or having other adverse consequences. (http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/departments/features/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003556617)
What do you guys think about this? Following Coca Cola's lessons, would a laser fired from a satellite work?
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In order to project something on the moon to have it visible during a full moon, you'd want the projection to be at least as bright as the sunlight hitting the full moon (about 1 kW per square metre).
In order to have a readable logo you'd probably need it to cover at least, say, 1% of the moon's visible surface area (about 9 million square km).
So that's 9e12 * 1000 * 0.01, or about 9e13 watts, which happens to be about fifty times more power than is produced by all the power plants in the world put together.
So I'm thinking that's a no.
...this feels alarmingly like what I do in my day job.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/SamuelBernard1.shtml
If you have a satellite with a reflective surface of roughly 1m2 you can make it look like a star when it is in low earth orbit. The reflective surface can be made out of space grade cellofan, and unfolded when it reaches orbit. Now if you have 50 satellites like this and are able to position them relative to one another (this is the tricky part) you can make a logo with 50 stars that will blaze across the night sky. You can even reposition them to create other logos.
We did a short feasibility study, and it is possible, but quite expensive.
Would be pretty cool though..
Being able to use the moon as an advertising billboard would be an interesting achievement. I somehow doubt it will happen anytime soon though and I'm curious of other details like who is in charge of regulating advertising on the moon?
- Mr. President! The Russians have landed on the moon, and they are busy painting it red!
- No problem. When they are done, we will just write "Drink Coca-Cola" in big white letters.