[StarVoyager]

NASA has used commercially available scopes on past missions and they have chosen Celestron before, their C5 Spotting scope had been on the shuttle many times:http://www.celestron.com/astronomy/celestron-c5-spotter.html.


I have my doubts that this is a marketing stunt. The cost per pound to orbit is about US$10,000 and the CPC 9.25 OTA is 58 pounds, so that’s around US$580,000 to send the scope up there! Assuming that Celestron has similar selling costs (which includes marketing) to what Meade has (http://www.meade.com/nasdaq/sec/Form_10-Q_Q3_FYE_2013.pdf) – US$560,000 – it would not make sense from a cost stand point to spend their entire marketing budget on one "campaign". So I assume that these scopes must be pretty effective experiment tools for NASA given the likely cost to the agency to launch them.