Last year, NASA declared the International Space Station open for business. Although firms could already do research on the ISS under contract with NASA, the agency hoped to stimulate pure commerce, including the manufacture of biotech and the development of on-orbit industries that could support NASA’s deep space exploration goals - not to mention bringing in some cash. Instead, it got beauty product marketing, sports shoe design and space tourism.
In a somewhat surprising turn of events, iconic beauty brand Estée Lauder is jumping on the space bandwagon and is sending products to space in order to shoot a new campaign. The company is shelling out $180,000 to have the advert shot by NASA on the International Space Station - the first beauty brand to launch into space with NASA.
Estée Lauder will be sending 10 bottles of its Advanced Night Repair Synchronized Multi-Recovery Complex serum into space, where it will be filmed and photographed by NASA astronauts in a four hour shoot located in the ISS’s Cupola - an observatory with seven windows that provide panoramic views of space.
The astronauts won’t appear in the images themselves and the bottles of serum will return to earth in the Northern Hemispheres’s spring season and Estée Lauder is set to auction one bottle off for charity.
In 2001, Pizza Hut became the first restaurant chain to deliver a pizza to space - a publicity stunt that cost around $1 million.
Whatever next?