Could you Make a Billboard in Space?

[tater]

Space is big...

[justidutch]

12 hours ago, tater said:

Space is big...

Like, a 'walk to the chemists' kind of big?

[tater]

Space is dark...

[Kerbart]

21 hours ago, justidutch said:

Instead of trying to get a mega-structure, mega-canvas, mega-sphere or anything mega into orbit, I would go for a different approach.

I am picturing a collection of cubesats, each with 3 lights (RGB) to act as individual pixels.  The cubesats would be able to be manoeuvred into whatever configuration is desired at any time, continuously face the earth's surface, and display the appropriate colour.  Therefore you are not restricted to just one slogan or advert, you could change it up to anything at any time.  Kind of like a big TV screen in orbit.  You would probably need thousands of the things, but whatever.

On different altitudes and orbits they'd float apart, so you will need tens of thousands to form a continuous band around earth and then light them up based on position. As a “positive” side effect you could have text running across the entire sky at that point (and likely invoking the hate of pretty much anyone looking at it). Not to mention the Kessler effect.

[tater]

It's hard to find...

[justidutch]

16 hours ago, _Augustus_ said:

You'd need over ten thousand CubeSats to make a 1km square billboard. This would require an entire Falcon 9 launch.  However, a Falcon 9 couldn't lift more than a few thousand CubeSats to orbit at once due to payload fairing size.  The average CubeSat costs around $7500, and a Falcon 9 launch costs $61.2 million. The CubeSats' cost would be $75 million, and the Falcon 9s would be another few hundred million.

And remember, you'd probably need a few dozen extra, as 10000 cubesats is more than the combined total of every spaceflight ever, and there have been about 5 catastrophic collisions/impacts on spacecraft that caused them to be disabled.

All in all, you're looking at a half-billion dollar project.

That is actually less than I would have expected.  I wonder how much Pepsi would be willing to pay for a week-long slogan orbiting the earth.  And then other companies would get in line.  I'll bet you could recoup the costs within a year.

 

10 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

On different altitudes and orbits they'd float apart...

Not if they are able to adjust their position independently, if they each had RCS and a reserve of monoprop

Edited September 9, 2016 by justidutch

[tater]

a place to park.

[Kerbart]

25 minutes ago, justidutch said:

Not if they are able to adjust their position independently, if they each had RCS and a reserve of monoprop

For giggles try this out in Kerbin orbit. I don't think it will go very well. Burning virtually continuously to keep formation is going to deplete the little fuel those Cubesats have very quickly, and I wonder how much DV you can stow in a 1U satellite.

Edited September 9, 2016 by Kerbart

[tater]

Burma Shave

[AtomicSnails]

What if you were to strap the cube sats together kind of like a strutted grid? that way its not enough surface area for solar wind to really affect it yet it doesn't drift away from the other satellites. The grid would need to be larger so that you could change the message to whatever you wanted it to be. Maybe there is a pivot on the cube sats so that they can tilt certain directions depending on if they need to reflect or not.

[SargeRho]

Yes, around the docking areas of large rotating space colonies. But elsewhere, it wouldn't make much sense.

[_Augustus_]

On 9/9/2016 at 1:54 PM, AtomicSnails said:

What if you were to strap the cube sats together kind of like a strutted grid? that way its not enough surface area for solar wind to really affect it yet it doesn't drift away from the other satellites. The grid would need to be larger so that you could change the message to whatever you wanted it to be. Maybe there is a pivot on the cube sats so that they can tilt certain directions depending on if they need to reflect or not.

On 9/8/2016 at 8:32 PM, _Augustus_ said:

You'd need over ten thousand CubeSats to make a 1km square billboard. This would require an entire Falcon 9 launch.

However, a Falcon 9 couldn't lift more than a few thousand CubeSats to orbit at once due to payload fairing size.

The average CubeSat costs around $7500, and a Falcon 9 launch costs $61.2 million. The CubeSats' cost would be $75 million, and the Falcon 9s would be another few hundred million.

And remember, you'd probably need a few dozen extra, as 10000 cubesats is more than the combined total of every spaceflight ever, and there have been about 5 catastrophic collisions/impacts on spacecraft that caused them to be disabled.

All in all, you're looking at a half-billion dollar project.

 

 

Snails, I already discussed the feasibility. Tethers would make it even more costly.

[A Fuzzy Velociraptor]

On September 8, 2016 at 6:20 AM, Nibb31 said:

You wouldn't want it to stay up there forever anyway. Ad campaigns don't last more than a year or two. You want it to come down eventually.

With the projector inside it wouldnt be hard to tell the projector to project a different image and you could keep it up longer.