Saturday Satellite Club

Ryo Kawaguchi, Naomi Kurahara and I all share a love and admiration of space, from the diversity of its natural beauty to all the the amazing things we’ve learned about the universe, planet Earth, physics and life itself.

For the longest time not thinking we'd ever have a chance to touch space, or even work in the industry. In recent years they both have been lucky enough to build a company that is a platform for media agencies and the like to track and communicate with their satellites in orbit. In being connected they recognized a newer, very specific type of satellite called a Cubesat that has made the potential to interact with space within the reach of a bunch of knobs like us! The original idea, which I feel is very punk, was to launch up a satellite and open a worldwide contest to be the first to hack it and bring it down. However we very quickly realized: that we didn't think we'd ever be able to do this is all the more reason we should loop in people who similarly don't (or don't think they) have access to such an opportunity! It then morphed into a longer experience with reaching out to underserved populations and schools, running multiple "missions" that would result in receiving things like snapshots of the earth that you initiated or turning on a new feature of the satellite. Essentially creating puzzles, learning opportunities and contents for a wider range of ages and backgrounds. I won't pretend this didn't also come from researching the price and timeline to have a satellite launched, this longer experience would make better use of both (other reasons the original idea was so punk haha). This mission structure allowed opportunities for different benefactors to fund different missions, and if push came to shove we could reach out to a larger brand (of course Doritos or Calbee would die to market having their delicious garbage in space ). We were at the stage where we started getting more folks involved, writing up ideas for an overarching narrative, fictional or real, when life and then quarantine put everything on hold. If you or anyone else are interested once things get rolling again I'll let you know and bring you into the conversation!