This Space for Rent

&M's were just another candy-coated chocolate until NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid had to do without them for six months. When she confessed her cravings to the galaxy during a news conference from the Russian space station Mir, Lucid launched M&M's into a place in history beside that tangy orange powdered beverage moonwalkers drank.

To NASA, an agency that insists on repackaging astronaut food in nondescript containers with generic labels, the idea of an Olympics-style corporate sponsorship of the International Space Station seems like heresy.

But maybe not for long.

"The limitations of spending on the space station are driving us to consider things that are not invented here," says Sidney Clinton, a marketing expert who came to NASA from the advertising industry to serve as a space station program analyst. Those ideas include buying everything from food to computers off the shelf instead of developing the products in-house, subscribing to power and communications utilities as homeowners do and signing corporate sponsors.

"Imagine Space Station Disney on the New York Stock Exchange in 2013," Clinton says, "and think back to where it started."

Off-the-shelf products already get a lot of use aboard the space shuttle, even if the brand names are rubbed out. With the proliferation of mobile satellite systems, it's not so crazy to think of the space station getting a phone bill.

But letting Holiday Inn call itself a proud sponsor of the International Space Station? While it's a bone-chilling prospect to most bureaucrats, Clinton says it's reasonable to ask all kinds of corporations to supply free products and scientific equipment for the privilege of putting a logo in plain view of onboard TV cameras.

The "branding," as he calls it, would follow strict rules. Outright advertising would be prohibited. Only brand-name graphics would be permitted, and then only inside the space station-except, perhaps, a hotel chain logo that Clinton envisions tacked to the corner of the U.S. habitation module in 2006. "We're going to change the mentality on the space station. It's going to become acceptable to do that kind of thing for sponsorship," he says.

Acceptable, maybe, but legal?

That will require a significant revision of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, a step deemed necessary by private companies seeking to exploit the final frontier.

Clinton says commercializing and eventually privatizing the International Space Station is the only way NASA will ever be able to concentrate on its primary mission of research and development. "If it's owned by Microsoft, or Reebok, or Fuji, or . . . any company in the world, they certainly are going to look at the right enhancements to make the most profit," he says. "It's the right thing to do in low-Earth orbit."

But don't expect to see U.S. astronauts hawking Pepsi, pretzels or anything else aboard the station. That, Clinton says, will always be banned.