NASA astronauts aboard the Cygnus spacecraft on the Antares rocket will fly to the International Space Station on October 1 to deliver ten bottles of Estée Lauder's Advanced Night Repair Serum.
The flight will last four days, and the astronauts will photograph and film the serum in the ISS' Cupola observatory with its heavily-windowed panoramic views of space. The agreement states that filming will take about four and a half hours. NASA team will dedicate around 5% of crew time to commercial activities, approximately 90 hours of astronaut work time per year. The cosmetic company will pay NASA about $128,000 for this space campaign.
"We are thrilled to reinforce our leadership once again as the first beauty brand to go into space," said Stéphane de La Faverie, group president of The Estée Lauder Companies and global brand president of Estée Lauder.
The resulting photos will be used as advertising across all Estée Lauder platforms. The astronauts themselves will not be in the pictures, but they can be photographed for an additional fee.
The serum will return to Earth in the spring of 2021. One of the bottles that have been in space will be put up for auction. Estée Lauder will donate the proceeds to charities.
Recall that in July 2020, NASA launched a campaign to raise funds for the perfume Eau de Space on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. It was created based on memories, notes, and impressions of astronauts who have already been in outer space.
Astronauts described the smell of space as a mixture of ozone, hot metal and fried steak, raspberries, rum, and even gunpowder. NASA began to use these smells in preparation for space missions as part of space modeling. It allows astronauts to get used to a specific scent in orbit.
