Soft and supple skin and space travel don’t typically go hand-in-hand, but that appears set to change with news overnight that cosmetic brand Estée Lauder is set to shoot the first-ever ad campaign in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
According to reports, Estée Lauder has teamed-up with NASA to send 10 bottles of its Advanced Night Repair serum to the ISS and have the astronauts capture the “imagery and video” of the product in zero-gravity for an ad campaign back here on Earth.
As part of the deal, NASA astronauts will spend more than four hours capturing the bottles on film and camera.
According to New Scientist, it will cost $US128,000 to send the product to the ISS via a Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft, which will bring an additional 3600 kilos of other supplies to the space station.
Estée will then be charged $US17,500 an hour for the astronauts’ time.
Commenting on the audacious plan, Estée Lauder’s president Stephane de la Faverie told a panel at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Ascend Summit last month that he was a “risk-taker”.
“That tends to basically come with ideas that are a little bit, you know, outside of the normal, traditional ways of doing marketing,” he said.
In the last few years, NASA has tried to raise funds by opening up the ISS to private companies to exploit for marketing and entertainment purposes. It has said any monies raised would go to maintaining and repairing the ISS.
Back in May, Tom Cruise announced he was working with director Doug Liman on filming his next movie aboard the ISS.
While a media production company called Space Hero Inc. has just announced plans to film the first reality TV show set in space, that will involve selecting one person from a group of contestants to travel to the ISS in 2023.
However, it’s not the first time brands have tried to play in the heavens.
Way back in 2001, Pizza Hut delivered a pizza onboard a resupply rocket to Russian astronaut Yuri Usachov, who was working on the ISS.
Usachov filmed himself eating the pizza that was reportedly “seasoned with extra spices, especially salt since it’s known that taste buds become a little dulled in space”. Check it out below:
