Crowded Spaceship
Open-Source, Crowdsourced Spaceship Design
"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." old Greek proverb
"A society grows great when people design spaceships whose hull they know they shall never sail in." new Human proverb
Project mission
Our mission is to collaboratively design a modular spacecraft optimized for microgravity, leveraging open source innovation to create a flexible, adaptable solution for various space missions. Through collaboration, we aim to push the boundaries of space exploration, making space more accessible, sustainable, and inclusive for the next era of human advancement.
Why Open-Source?
Open-source development in space technology is essential because it democratizes access to space.
By doing this now, and releasing it as open-source, we ensure that everyone will have the opportunity to participate in and benefit from space exploration, without large corporations and governments controlling all the IP.
With this project, we can lay the foundation for a future where exploration, colonization, and commerce in space are driven by a collective effort, ensuring that space remains a place of opportunity for all.
Designs will be published under the CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Strongly Reciprocal
Why Croudsourced?
Crowdsourcing this project allows anyone and everyone, including you (whether you're an engineer, scientist, artist, enthusiast, or ideator), to contribute ideas, designs and specifications into this project for the benefit of anyone who wants to use it in the future. Free and open access to our best ideas.
This collaboration helps ensure that the spaceship modules we develop represent the shared vision and values of our community's hopes for our future in space.
Why Modular Designs?
We want to create spaceships from modules. This approach develops reusable designs to maximize flexibility for a variety of mission designs, whilst allowing contributors to focus on what suits their skills and interests.
We'll determine parameters and specifications for the overarching design and then apply that commonality to module development to ensure interoperability.
It also means that as new technologies emerge, individual modules can be upgraded or replaced. We can even leave 'black boxes' in modules where we hope future technological advances can be used.
Why Microgravity?
Designing a spaceship for microgravity means that we don't need to account for launch stresses, atmospheric effects or major gravitational loads, freeing us to design a functional and efficient ship for exploration or orbital facilities.
This means that, for now, we will assume that construction/ fabrication resources will become available, or the cost of delivery of materials to space dramatically reduces. Lots of people are already working on these things, so we can focus on our thing!
Sub-orbital craft, landers or ships that can do 'everything' are not our main focus, but don't let that discourage you if you want to contribute to those areas. Our goal is to get all your ideas out as open-source.