One Giant Step for Mankind? Moon Ads?

While the world celebrates the 40th anniversary of the first manned-mission to the moon, an entrepreneur in Utah wants to patent a system for creating ads on the moon.

David Jones, owner of Moon Publicity of West Valley City, Utah, has filed a U.S. provisional application for "Shadow Shaping," a system that uses robotic vehicles to carve product names, logos and web URLs into the surface of the moon. The serial number of the application is 61/150,054, which means that it was probably filed in October or November of 2008. Jones has one year to file a regular patent application based on his provisional. Provisional applications are not published, so it may be more than a year before the world gets to see the details of his invention.

Inventions relating to advertising are generally classified in Class 40, Card, Picture or Sign Exhibiting. This includes skywriting and ground advertisements designed to be seen from aircraft.