SPACE was once the last frontier, where the US and the USSR thought for supremacy. Now space is where cola drinks battle for consumers' hearts and minds.
The Russian Mir space station has been used to produce the first advertisement to be filmed in space. Cosmonauts Yuri Ivanovich Onufrienko and Yuri Vladimirovich Usachev have walked in space to film a large scale expandable replica of Pepsi Cola's new blue can.
Pepsi is part funding the Russian space programme and the space commercial is the first of a number of joint initiatives with the Mir station which Pepsi says will help to fund future experiments in space.
The Pepsi can in the commercial is actually an orbital spacecraft which the cosmonauts had tethered, to the outside of the Mir station, according to the company. It is made of space grade nylon and aluminium.
Pepsi's first venture into space was in 1985, when a soft drinks dispenser aboard the US shuttle, Challenger, allowed astronauts to drink the cola in zero gravity. A number of advertisements have featured a space theme and the can in space will be part of the company's advertising campaign next year.
Pepsi's marketing manager for Ireland, Ms Maeve Guthrie, said yesterday that space has "universal and futuristic appeal".