Sculpture that unravels in space could become most widely viewed artwork of all time Large 'balloon' to be launched in space as an Art object. Lifespan - est 3 months. The shiny side is 'down'.... Related Space advertising - Wikipedia Advets in space are just (an illegal) steps away. Fiction has covered this in the past - you know, anything for a buck. In Fredric Brown's 1945 short story, "Pi in the Sky," an inventor rearranges the apparent positions of the stars to form an advertising slogan. In Robert A. Heinlein's 1951 novella The Man Who Sold the Moon the protagonist raises funds for his lunar ambitions by publicly describing means of covering the visible lunar face in advertising and propaganda, and then taking money not to do so. In Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story Buy Jupiter, a group of extraterrestrials broker a deal with the governments of Earth to purchase the planet Jupiter so that they could use it as an advertisement platform to the starships from their worlds that passed by the planet.
And in 40 years we will or someone will read about the Art getting tangled up around whatever space station is around at the time
The Art piece will be in very ow earth orbit and will be lucky to stay up for 90 days. It will remain attached to the deploy canister, the weight will drag ir back. They really did check for light pressure (solar sail) to ensure it would not change orbit....except to fall back.
It should be at least as visible as the space station. It may look like a star during the day time if the reflection is good. If they are going to put it in a decaying orbit it will probably only be up about 50 or so miles, the space station is up 520 miles I believe.
The hams are already making plans to try using it as a passive reflector V/Uhf contacts using meteor burst programs. Could be great fun, I'll have to wait to see if this will come up over my radio horizon. We rarely see the ISS.
The best time to see iss will be up to 2 hours before sun up and just after sun rise and right before sun set and up to 2 hours after sun is down. I'm pretty sure I saw it about a week ago around 90 degrees up from the horizon. There is a nasa iss tracker that will calculate when it's visible, for how long and what direction it will be.
