(Photo: I co-hosted one of the previous year’s Yuri’s Night events, in Houston. It was a blast. Plastered cosmonauts plastered me with Yuri Gagarin stick-on tattoos.)

The folks behind Yuri’s Night, an annual global space party that celebrates peace through space exploration, are looking for your creative help to design an awesome new ad campaign to get people to care about space. Yuri’s Night’s Loretta Hidalgo-Whitesides invited me to be one of the judges and I happily accepted. This year’s celebration is a special one: it marks 50 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human to leave earth for space.

Loretta says,

The Space Exploration Advertisement Competition will award a 4-day tour of Moscow, Russia, including a microgravity flight in an Ilyushin-76 aircraft, to an artist, designer or creative individual who creates a print ad which best captures the wonder of space and demonstrates the potential to best inspire the public. The winner will be judged by a celebrity panel of space notables, but entries will also be eligible for a fan-voted People’s Choice Award with another exciting set of prizes.

My co-judge is Ariel Waldman of Spacehack.org, about whom Pesco blogged recently. Contest details follow, along with word of two additional contests you can enter with even more totally awesome space prizes:

As we celebrate 50 years
of human space exploration on Yuri’s Night this April 12th, it
is more important than ever to ensure that humankind continues
to explore the final frontier. This ad could be a poster,
magazine advertisement, postcard etc. that will inspire and
empower people to go to space and create an inspiring future
for humanity.

We want a piece that summons a sense of
wonder at the utter vastness of the cosmos and our
overwhelmingly fragile place in it. We want a piece that that
awakens a feeling of unity with all mankind, and that we are up
to the challenge of becoming a species worthy of settling the
galaxy – and that Yuri’s launch was merely the first step in an
endless human journey to the stars.

The winner would
capture the spirit and tone of the 3 minute
YouTube Video “NASA – The Frontier is Everywhere” in
a print medium to spread the meme to another million people.

Deadline: Submit your art on or
before April 15th. Entries are accepted via Facebook: you just
need to post
the .jpg or equivalent to the Yuri’s Night Facebook
page before that date. You can
view entries here. The entry with the most ‘likes’
gets a special People’s Choice Award. The winning artist, as
selected by judges (including me!), gets a free trip to Russia
to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre where they’ll
experience floating weightless on the Ilyushin 76 Cosmonaut
training aircraft.

( Image
above: Aaron
Muszalski, shot by
Scott
Beale, at Yuri’s night
2007.)

Separately, the Yuri’s
Night folks are also offering a Russian
Space Tour Sweepstakes, with a grand prize of a trip
to view a Soyuz liftoff from the steppes of Kazakhstan from
Baikonur. The deadline for this one is also April 15th.

And finally, there’s the “Open Luna Video
Contest,” an open source competition to engage the
public to create tribute videos for the 50th Anniversary of
Human Spaceflight to share at Yuri’s Night events around the
world. The prize on that one is $500, and again, an April 15
deadline.

Go to yurisnight.net/contests
to sign up for the sweepstakes and to get more information on
the ad contest.