A beverage company is planning a new, out of this world (literally) ad campaign. Pocari Sweat, a Japanese sports drink, might be the first product advertised on the moon.
According to Fortune, Space X, Tesla founder Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, is planning on sending a rover to the moon in 2016, and a case of Pocari Sweat will be onboard.
The beverage company stated that the campaign’s goal “is for a modern-day child to someday become an astronaut and eventually drink its contents.” The Pocari Sweat sent to the moon will be in powder form. For the proposed future astronaut to drink it, however, they will need to be able to create water on the moon by extracting oxygen and processing it with hydrogen, which NASA hopes to do by 2018. We’re also not sure how the taste of a sports drink would hold up on the moon’s surface for years at a time.
Fortune reported that Astrobotic, the U.S. company designing the rover, charges approximately $1.2 million per kilogram. The price of taking Pocari Sweat to the moon is estimated to be less than $8 million, though, which is the price of a one-minute commercial during the Super Bowl.
Though we on Earth are used to seeing advertisements in some form pretty much everywhere, seeing them on the moon seems a bit far-fetched. However, the technology is there. Moon Publicity Corp., which specializes in the idea of lunar advertising, has already secured a patent for its “shadow shaping technology,” which forms a shadow pattern on the moon’s surface with a vehicle, creating a pre-designed pattern that is viewable when sunlight hits the area from a specific angle.
Though the concept seems foreign now, future stargazers might be used to seeing an ad-covered moon.
