DALLAS (AP) -- An international space race is on again, with advertisers competing to boldly go where they never have before.
It's not about which nation pushes farther in space exploration. Instead, it concerns which program gets more help in an era of shrinking budgets.The Russian space program is getting a multimillion-dollar boost from Texas-based Pizza Hut, which will paint a 30-foot advertisement on a Proton rocket in November. NASA says it isn't far behind, with private partnerships envisioned to reduce costs for the agency.
"This is the colonization of public space by commercial interests," said James Twitchell, a University of Florida professor who studies commercial culture.
Pizza Hut announced Thursday that it would pay the cash-starved Russian space agency about half the price of a 30-second TV ad during the Super Bowl -- currently up to $2.5 million -- for the right to paint its logo on a Russian Proton rocket.
The rocket is scheduled to blast off in mid-November.
The segment carrying the Pizza Hut logo will be cast off and burn up in the atmosphere before it reaches orbit. But Pizza Hut marketers are counting on the minutes leading up to liftoff and the sight of the engines firing under the company's red-roof logo to provide enough film footage to fuel years of advertising campaigns.
Don't expect American spacecraft to look similar any time soon.
While U.S. law doesn't preclude placing corporate logos on American spacecraft, NASA would not consider it on taxpayer property, agency spokesman Brian Welch said.
Still, Daniel Tam, NASA's assistant to the administrator for commercialization, said space agencies need to think about the marketing potential they can offer.
"We want to find a way to get the commercial sector involved as fast as possible and effectively as possible so that we can . . . move on to explore beyond the solar system," Tam said.
He said privatizing certain projects would free NASA to perform cutting-edge research and development toward far frontier explorations.
The U.S. space agency is considering some fully commercial shuttle flights in the future. And NASA officials have met with representatives of about 100 companies, in addition to aerospace contractors, on possible ties.
The Russians, meanwhile, have used corporate advertising to their advantage before. PepsiCo Inc. paid $5 million three years ago to have cosmonauts float a replica of a soda can outside the Mir space station.
