In January 2018, Rocket Lab sent a surprise to orbit. Along with its normal payloads, the launch company deployed a shiny object it dubbed the Humanity Star—basically a 3-foot-wide disco ball. Its reflective surface would shine down on Earth’s inhabitants, visible to the naked eye for a few months. “No matter where you are in the world, or what is happening in your life, everyone will be able to see the Humanity Star in the night sky,” founder Peter Beck said in a statement. “Our hope is that everyone looking at the Humanity Star will look past it to the vast expanse of the Universe and think a little differently about their lives, actions, and what is important for humanity.”

Astronomers, concerned with light pollution, tended to take a dimmer view. “This is stupid, vandalizes the night sky and corrupts our view of the cosmos,” tweeted Columbia University professor David Kipping.

Over in Russia, a guy named Vlad Sitnikov saw it differently from both Beck and the scientists. “For me, it is great,” he says, “because someone made something new, and it was entertainment.” Though lots of people tune in to livestreams of rocket launches as one might to a TV drama, their purpose isn’t entertainment. The idea that a person could use space in this way intrigued Sitnikov.

Soon, he started to think maybe he could use space in this way, for entertainment. More specifically, for advertising. “I decided to check the ability," he says. "Can we make the billboard in the sky?”

Yes, maybe. To pursue the idea, Sitnikov founded StartRocket, which plans to use a hundreds-strong constellation of CubeSats, each equipped with a reflective sail, to display ads, and perhaps emergency and event-based messages.

Though this particular endeavor is new and has yet to get off the literal ground, it’s not the first overhead ad/entertainment project. Tilt your head at a certain angle, and that’s what the Humanity Star was. In 1993, an American company wanted to launch a square-kilometer Mylar sheet: the Space Billboard. France considered celebrating the anniversaries of the French Revolution and the Eiffel Tower with a set of satellites called the Ring of Light. The 1996 Atlanta Olympics? It also could have had a space show, but it didn’t get enough funding.

Maybe you find the future that this portends distasteful. Maybe StartRocket’s homepage picture of people sitting on a hill above a city, a fiddled-with Coke logo (it looks like “Loca Cola”) beaming over the buildings, to be too dystopian. Maybe you find Loca Cola no more intrusive than the lights of the city below. Maybe you even think it’s fun (taste the feeling!). Like it or not, there’s no international ban on space advertising. With access to orbit going down in price and more companies hoping to do business up there, StartRocket’s vision is unlikely to be the only one of its kind.

But Sitnikov is neither rocket scientist nor satellite engineer. He was just a guy with an idea—and a Facebook account. He launched a competition on his page, where he has a few thousand followers, “so everybody could propose their own ideas about how to make images on orbit." Along came Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, and the idea to use small satellites and reflecting sails that unfurl and furl back. With an array of 200 to 300 (and a few spares), StartRocket plans to use each satellite’s 10-meter sail as a pixel—when deployed, it’s “on”; when stashed, it’s “off.” In the lowest orbit, they'd each be about 100 meters apart. By lighting up different ones, it can create different images. “It’s not rocket science,” quips Sitnikov.