On October 21, 2001, a pair of Russian cosmonauts boarded a Soyuz TM-33 rocket for the International Space Station, which orbits Earth two hundred and thirty miles above its surface. They were on a mission to film the first high-definition television commercial in outer space. Later, millions of Japanese television viewers saw the astronauts—one floating in the cable-strewn guts of the space station, the other calmly gazing at Earth through a small hatch window—sipping from bottles of Pocari Sweat, a popular, if curiously named, Japanese sports drink.
Last month, the Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company, the manufacturer of Pocari Sweat, announced that it would once more send its flagship beverage into space. In October, 2015, the company plans to deposit a time capsule containing Pocari Sweat in a deep impression on the northeastern part of the moon. The capsule would have the distinction of being the first delivery of a commercial product on the moon.
The history of advertising is full of spectacular public-relations stunts. In 1903, a French sports magazine called L’Auto organized the first Tour de France to boost its circulation. On April 1, 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in the Times, claiming to have purchased the Liberty Bell to reduce the national debt. (It hadn’t; the ad was an April Fool’s Day joke.) Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, is well known for his antics, which have included crossing the Atlantic Ocean by hot-air balloon, in 1987. But space remained a largely unexplored frontier for commercial endeavors—until recently, when space exploration began to be entangled with private enterprise at an increasingly rapid pace. The global financial crisis devastated funding for national space programs. NASA ended its shuttle program in 2011, and, since then, American astronauts have been hitching rides to the International Space Station with the Russians, on the same Soyuz rockets that have, since 2001, occasionally carried tourists into outer space.
To send Pocari Sweat into space, Otsuka will rely on a rocket called the Falcon 9, which is manufactured by SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk, in 2002. (Tad Friend has written about Musk for the magazine.) Otsuka will also be working with two startups: Astrobotic Technology, based in Pittsburgh, and Astroscale, of Singapore. The two companies, founded in 2008 and 2013, respectively, are among the first to invest heavily in technological innovations whose success will depend on the private-market potential of space travel, rather than on government contracts meant to promote scientific progress and national prestige.
Astrobotic, a robotics company that focusses on developing technologies for commercial lunar deliveries and exploration, will provide a lander for the Pocari Sweat delivery, known as the Griffin. (In doing so, the company hopes to win the Google Lunar X Prize, a twenty-million-dollar award for the first privately funded mission that lands a robot on the moon and sends it across five hundred metres of the lunar surface while transmitting high-definition video and images.) The Griffin lander will carry a time capsule called the Lunar Dream, built by Astroscale, which will contain the beverage and will be left on the moon. It’s an ironic task for the company, which develops technologies to clean up the space debris circulating near Earth. None of the companies involved in the Otsuka mission have disclosed the cost of the project, but Astrobotic’s advertised rates for commercial lunar delivery are more than half a million dollars per pound.
People have been hurling similar messages in bottles into outer space for a long time. In 1972, NASA sent the Pioneer 10 space probe on the first course outside the solar system, and a year later the Pioneer 11 became the first to reach Saturn; each carried a six-by-nine-inch gold-anodized aluminum plaque depicting a map of the solar system, with Earth’s location marked, and illustrations of nude male and female figures. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, sent to space by NASA in 1977, each transported gold-plated copper phonograph records, complete with a stylus and etchings indicating playback instructions, along with the inscription “to the makers of music—all worlds, all times.” Recorded on each disk were works by Beethoven, Mozart, the Chinese zither master Guan Pinghu, the Indian classical vocalist Kesarbai Kerkar, and the rock-and-roll pioneer Chuck Berry, among others, as well as greetings in fifty-five languages. More recently, in 2011, NASA’s Juno spacecraft carried, on its five-year journey to Jupiter, specially made Lego figurines of the Roman god Jupiter, his wife, Juno, and the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, each cast in aluminum, to endure the extreme conditions of space travel. There is a Chinese story, believed to be more than five hundred years old, about a bureaucrat named Wan Hu, who vanished in a cloud of smoke and fire after stepping aboard a spacecraft made from a chair, kites, and forty-seven bamboo stems packed with dynamite; since then, it seems, space has become a curio shelf.
The U.S. fascination with projecting its culture into space nearly reached grotesque proportions in 1993, when an American company called Space Marketing, Inc., attempted to raise funds for an illuminated billboard, which, from earth, would appear roughly the size of the moon, in low orbit. It would be made from Mylar and would be visible from Earth. The venture failed, and led to legislation banning U.S. companies from advertising in space; this was later amended to permit “unobtrusive” sponsorships and product placement. That allowed Pizza Hut, in 2001, to pay a million dollars to deliver a vacuum-sealed pizza to astronauts aboard the International Space Station; a few years earlier, in 1997, Tnuva, a dairy company based in Israel, had filmed a commercial for milk aboard the Russian space station Mir.
These enterprises have often relied heavily on government programs and equipment, like the special high-definition television cameras that Japan’s National Space Development Agency loaned Otsuka for the shooting of the 2001 Pocari Sweat commercial. The latest Pocari Sweat project marks a shift toward all-private business ventures in outer space, and while this may seem, at first, to be prohibitively expensive for advertisers, the cost of putting a bottle of Pocari Sweat on the moon will be significantly less than the four million dollars that companies paid to run a thirty-second advertisement during this year’s Super Bowl.
A spokesman for Otsuka said that the company hopes not only to make Pocari Sweat the first sports drink landed on a celestial body but also to convince people that “life on the moon could become a reality sometime soon.” As far that goes, Otsuka and its collaborators might have chosen a destination with a more appropriate name. Astrobotic’s Griffin lander will deposit its payload in a sunken plain called Lacus Mortis, which, in Latin, means “lake of death.”
Photograph: Pocari Sweat/Space Films.
