Commentary: Should NASA Sell Ads?
Before answering, we should admit how much we allow commercials to intrude in our lives.
- By Bob Garfield
- Air & Space magazine, July 2000
You probably know the joke: At a party, a wizened old tycoon approaches a curvaceous blonde. “If I gave you a check for $5 million,” he asks her, “would you sleep with me tonight?” She looks at him, stunned. He’s a revolting specimen, but five million bucks would take care of her sick parents and set her up for life. “All right,” she replies, gulping. “I’ll do it.” Thereupon the old guy hands her a $5 bill and starts to lead her away. “Five dollars!” she cries. “What do you think I am?!” The old man glowers at her: “We’ve established what you are. At this point we’re just haggling over price.”
Now then, about the space program...
So NASA is preparing to lease parts of the International Space Station and associated missions to private interests. And the space agency is even considering making itself available to advertisers—advertisers!—for brand promotion and who knows what else. And that all seems so unsavory, so indecent, so corrupt. First they’re launching commercial satellites, then maybe subletting square footage in the space station to, say, Intel ($20.8 million per “site bundle”), then—what?—Tang commercials in orbit? Ugh. There are some things you just don’t do for money, because once you do, you have established what you are, and thereafter it’s just talking price.
Yessiree, it’s easy to approach NASA’s flirtation with commercialism with raised eyebrows and the sort of scorn we tend to heap on the morally inferior. But before we start condemning the space agency for even thinking about prostituting itself, perhaps we ought to get in touch with our own inner whores.
We the people, I’m talking about.
We who endure television commercials because we get the programming for free. There’s no way to know what pay TV would fetch for “ER” or “60 Minutes” or “The World’s Most Infected Animal Bites” or whatever, but no doubt the tariff would be steep. So we sit through the spots for Correctol and HeadingForChapterXI.com pretty much without complaint. Likewise, we suffer Internet billboard ads, because we get Web content for free. We let our kids watch TV spots in homeroom on video equipment provided, gratis, by our good friends at Channel 1. Many people are letting their private long-distance phone calls be interrupted by ads in exchange for toll-free conversation. With lesser degrees of acquiescence, we get pummeled by advertising in the supermarket, at the gas pump, on the golf course, in the bus, at the beach, and—in a most peculiar exercise of mutually indecent exposure—at the barroom urinal.
That’s because as a society, we’ve long since demonstrated that we will accept, even embrace, advertising messages almost anywhere, provided there’s an acceptable quid pro quo. And there’s not a thing wrong with that. You can plumb the anthropological depths all you want to discover how a culture can so blithely surrender its peace and quiet, to say nothing of privacy, in exchange for “Baywatch.” You can rail against the environmental evils of the consumer society and advertising’s incendiary role within it. And you can certainly excoriate a large percentage of the ads themselves for breathtaking stupidity. The fact remains, however, that the American people, in their media consumption and their mortgage payments alike, are accustomed to being subsidized.
Sure, it is a deal with the devil, and one need only look at the programming on commercial TV to see that the devil’s got the upper hand. But it’s a deal we made long ago, with our eyes wide open. Truly, it is the American way. So at a time when the balanced federal budget has imposed austerity across the board, why wouldn’t NASA want to benefit the same way—i.e., by subsidizing the taxpayers’ share of space exploration with a reasonable percentage of commercial revenue?
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