How Six Companies Turned Space into a Marketing and Science Opportunity

Humans first blasted off the Earth in April, 1961, when Russian Yuri Gagarin made a 108-minute orbital flight in his Vostok 1 spacecraft. American Alan B. Shepard Jr followed less than a month later. Americans visited the Moon nine times between 1968 and 1972, and the International Space Station has been continually inhabited since Oct. 31, 2000, with crew members spending a few weeks to nearly an entire year there. Now SpaceX and Northrop Grumman cargo resupply spacecraft regularly take supplies, scientific experiments, and even the occasional bottle of wine or soccer ball to the space station. 

In 2020, SpaceX even became the first private company to successfully launch people into space from U.S. soil on its Crew -1 mission, followed shortly by Crew-2. In July, 2021, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic flew paying customers to the edge of space, with the promise of more trips to come.  

With more opportunities than ever to get to space, we founded Stellar Access as a way to make low-Earth orbit more widely accessible. We bring together a community of providers that can send just about anyone or anything off the Earth.   

To open your mind to the possibilities of space, here’s a brief guide to what some companies have already sent into orbit, paving the way for marketing and research in microgravity.  

Estée Lauder considers its Advanced Night Repair Serum a star, so naturally the cosmetics company wanted to send a bottle of it closer to some real stars in low-Earth orbit. Ten bottles of the serum flew to the space station in fall 2020, a journey touted by the company as “the first beauty brand to go into space.” Estée Lauder announced that it chose Advanced Night Repair Synchronized Multi-Recovery Complex for the journey because the product has a legacy of firsts, including as the first nighttime repair serum in the beauty industry and the first beauty product to use hyaluronic acid. 

Astronauts took pictures of the little brown bottles floating in the cupola of the space station in front of panoramic views of Earth. The company has used the images online and on social media, and plans to auction off one bottle for charity. 

Say à votre santé! Twelve bottles of Pétrus 2000 Bordeaux wine flew to the space station in November 2019 aboard a Northrop Grumman craft chartered by Space Cargo Unlimited, to assess how microgravity affects wine as it ages.  The wine returned after 438 days and a taste test conducted by 12 panelists evaluated the wine highly. One of the panelists noted the wine tasted as if aged several years more than bottles on the ground. One expert attributed the difference in taste in part to microgravity’s lack of convection, which causes a specific reaction during the wine aging process on Earth. The researchers plan to publish their results in a scientific journal.   

One of the bottles will be auctioned by Christie’s, with the British auction house estimating a selling price “in the region of $1 million.” Typically, a bottle of 2000 Chateau Pétrus fetches more than $7,000. The buyer also receives an Earth-bound bottle of the same wine. Space Cargo Unlimited plans to use auction proceeds to fund additional research into gravity’s effects on agriculture and viticulture. Because every space voyage needs to have good wine.  

No, you cannot shower in space. But Delta Faucet Company sent its H2OKinetic® shower head technology to the space station in an effort to improve showers here on Earth, where we take them regularly (right?). Shower devices with lower flow rates conserve water, but those lower flow rates also reduce the effectiveness of the devices, meaning some people take longer showers and undermine the whole less–water goal. Delta’s technology creates larger, faster water droplets that make less water feel like more. The company plans to use the space station study to design more precise control of water droplets, helping to conserve more water without compromising shower satisfaction.