Syncom 1, the first geosynchronous satellite. Image via NASA.

The patent complexity of architecture, its need to bring together many minds and many hands to enact physical change upon the environment, once restricted the medium’s services to a powerful elite. But these days, architecture’s more pluralistic streak has emerged, approaching full force in the forms of incredible temporary pavilions, subversive urban interventions, self-built homes, and inhabitable sculptures (just think of Burning Man). What’s the next frontier for this movement? Well, outer space, of course. According to the BBC, a group of German hackers are in the midst of developing a DIY space program that would use ungoverned satellites to provide uncensored Internet to earthlings. Read on.

Buzz Aldrin next to a solar wind experiment. Image via NASA.

During the 1960’s, the high stakes of space exploration pitted the United States against the Soviet Union in a war over a spectacle-driven stronghold on the popular imagination. Before, during, and after the televised first moon landing in 1969, government and military forces worked tirelessly to launch objects and men into the upper atmosphere. Now, over four decades later, we continue to conceive of space as both vastly out of reach and absolutely colonized by the terrestrial elite, namely a handful of national agencies and large companies.

But the Hackerspace Global Grid, a project organized by hacker activists at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, has a different conception of space, one that imagines this ‘other’ environment as a frontier filled with possibilities and entirely up for grabs. 26-year-old Armin Bauer tells the BBC that the only real hurdle between the everyman and his right to access outer space is a lack of funding. After all, amateur enthusiasts have already launched a number of camera-toting high-altitude balloons and radio satellites into near space. Apparently, duplicating what NASA did in the 1960’s is surprisingly easy today, especially for a technologically advanced group of hackers.

The Mars Pathfinder (left) and the Mars Global Surveyor (right). Images via NASA.

The hackers in Berlin saw one major hypothetical impediment to a seamless, full-fledged amateur space program: pinpointing orbiting objects from the ground is particularly difficult. While professionals have the funds to place objects in exact locations in space, amateurs would likely need to guide their satellites to exact destinations from the ground.

But this is where the “Global Grid” part kicks in. Bauer and his team have proposed a distributed network of low-cost ground stations that can be easily built. These stations are based on what Bauer describes as a “reverse GPS” concept; they would be able to “pinpoint satellites at any given time, while also making it easier and more reliable for fast-moving satellites to send data back to earth.”

While technical complications still abound in terms of perfecting satellite placement and efficiently relaying signals back to Earth—not to mention how the very concept of unregulated satellites in space will raise questions about censorship, national security, and who has the right to what—we are reminded of the most inspiring and productive aspects of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is exciting to see a self-empowered group of individuals pooling their resources and talents together to actively seed change and shape the future.

Rendering of OSCAR7, an amateur radio satellite successfully launched in 1974. Image via.

by Kelly Chan

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tagged censorship, germany, hacker, Hackers, Hackerspace Global Grid, internet!, NASA, outer space, satellites, space, the internet

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