NASA considers boost to brand with rocket ads
WASHINGTON» The constant creep of corporate America into all aspects of everyday life — from the Allstate Sugar Bowl to Minute Maid Park — may soon conquer a new frontier.
The final frontier.
NASA’s administrator Jim Bridenstine has directed the space agency to look at boosting its brand by selling naming rights to rockets and spacecraft and allowing its astronauts to appear in commercials and on cereal boxes, as if they were celebrity athletes.
While officials stress that nothing has been decided, the idea could mark a giant cultural leap for the taxpayerfunded government agency and could run
into ethics regulations that prevent government officials from using public office for private gain.
NASA has steadfastly stayed away from endorsing any particular product or company — even going so far as to call the M&Ms astronauts gobble in space “candycoated chocolates” for fear of even appearing to favor one brand of candy.
But during a recent meeting of a NASA advisory council, Bridenstine announced he was standing up a committee to examine what he called the “provocative questions” of turning its rockets into corporate billboards the way advertisements decorate NASCAR race cars.
“Is it possible for NASA to offset some of its costs by selling the naming rights to its spacecraft, or the naming rights to its rockets?” Bridenstine asked. “I’m telling you there is interest in that right now. The question is: Is it possible? The answer is: I don’t know, but we want somebody to give us advice on whether it is.”
He also said he wanted astronauts to be not only more accessible to journalists but even to participate in marketing opportunities to boost their brands — and that of the space agency.
“I’d like to see kids growing up, instead of maybe wanting to be like a professional sports star, I’d like to see them grow up wanting to be a NASA astronaut, or a NASA scientist,” he said. “I’d like to see, maybe one day, NASA astronauts on the cover of a cereal box, embedded into the American culture.”
The effort is part of a broader effort to generate more privatesector involvement in low Earth orbit. NASA already relies on companies to fly cargo to the space station — and is already on path to relying on companies to deliver crew. The White House has also said it would like to end direct funding for the International Space Station, and turn over operations of the orbiting laboratory to a private entity. Meanwhile, there are other companies looking to develop their own commercial space stations. And the White House is working to ease regulations to promote privatesector growth.
That idea to privatize the International Space Station has run into opposition from Congress, which said the United States shouldn’t cede control of an asset that it has invested nearly $100 billion in.
Likewise, the idea to sell naming rights, or have astronauts appear in commercials, was met with skepticism from many NASA experts. Scott Kelly, the former NASA astronaut who spent nearly a year in space, said in an email to The Washington Post that it “would be a dramatic shift from the rules prohibiting government officials from using their public office for private gain,” he wrote. “But I guess this is the world we live in now.”
Scott Amey, the general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said that the government “should be focused entirely on what is most important for the public interest, not private gain. In fact, if a project is commercially viable it shouldn’t have to depend on taxpayer funds or U.S. astronauts, who might be divided in their job responsibilities.”