About a year ago I started ranting at the internet about this crazy idea of space enthusiasts and hobbyists getting organised enough on a global scale to run a proper space program. An organisation that potentially could match or even outperform current corporations and even some nations.

This system would heavily depend on the internet and some form of crowd funding and crowd organising platform that could coordinate fund collection and distribution, and also splitting the large problem of getting into space into tiny chunks and distributing it amongst the makerspaces of the world /or anyone else who wants in to be frank/. All of this would be solidly based on opensource technologies and open science principles, sharing information for the mutual benefit of faster problem solving and implementation of solutions.

I don’t think current crowd funding sites have what it takes to get this done, but I do think that it is achievable with the addition of using the wisdom of the gaming industry. Eventhough there are a lot of space enthusiasts out there like myself, there is no single project that managed to round them up and concentrate their attention more than games like EVE online. I have also found myself hesitating at sharing my resources because of trust issues or because of not being able to see how a certain project would make it. On the otherhand I find it much more easy to spend my money or time on entertainment of all sorts despite the fact that I would love to see my money and time make a difference for all of us.

I think if we used some tricks from the gaming industry, and tricked ourselves into an entertaining game that would not only motivate us to spend our time at makerspaces or contributing in other ways towards a crazy space program like this, but would also make it easier for us to part with surplus money, then we could get this done.

With the handicap of almost no programming skills I started working on a game. I am learning as I go along. I want to try and have a go at a new version of crowd funding and crowd organising. I also want others to try because at the pace I am doing this, it probably will never be done.

I encourage anyone who is reading this and knows programming to start their own project because I don’t think crowd funding has reached it’s true potential. Also if anybody is interested in a chat or discussion, or have any input regarding my lame project just shoot me a message.

You can find me at freespaceships.com. It’s just a stupid blog I used to vent some steam last year because my brain was malfunctioning for a while. The only reason I posted a comment here is because I am still looking for people who are either already working on this or would like to work on this. I can garantee no adds, or popups, and a lot of bad blogposts.

Cheers,
Balazs