 I'm here to talk about a thing called Libra Space Foundation and tell you the story of the Libra Space Foundation and I'm going to kind of tell you the story by talking about the project that the Libra Space Foundation delivers. So just for now, the Libra Space Foundation, the kind of main aim of the Libra Space Foundation is to make space seem a bit closer to everybody because we often think like spaces as Ben sort of alluded to in his great talk. This thing that happens at NASA or ESA in these massive buildings that we don't have access to and stuff like that. A Libra Space really wants to kind of democratise space and bring it closer to us. And also critically they want to work in an open source way which I'm pretty sure most of the people in this room will have a mere inkling of what that might mean. And also they are sort of a bit political I guess in that they want to kind of develop space stuff but outside of the kind of war and defence kind of methodologies that is the kind of classic way that stuff seems to get developed in space. So let's just, oh I should have said some stuff about me. Yes I'm Joe, I'm Aaron's concrete dog, I'm a freelancer, I have never ever grown up or made my mind up what I want to do in my life so currently at the moment I write for Hackspace magazine, I do a bit of work for this lot, I tinker with things, I like machining things, I make stuff, I'm one of them. Yeah, there we go. Right, so who's heard of Satnogs? Oh that's pretty good, I've been in rooms where that's just been like the tumbleweed comes across and stuff. So Satnogs is the first project of the Libra Space Foundation and in fact it existed before the Libra Space Foundation was even a thing. And it came out of this thing called the NASA Space Apps Challenge, apologies to any American people in the room for that terrible accent. Does anybody heard of NASA Space Apps? No, so NASA Space Apps, a couple of people, so NASA Space Apps is like NASA run this thing where they set up hackathons and they all happen concurrently around the world on the same weekend. Local individuals, so somebody at Hebden Bridge from Bridge Rectifier could go, we're going to run a space app challenge in Hebden Bridge and they get in touch with the team and they get sent resources and materials and branding stuff and they can run their own kind of hackathol in line with all the others happening around the world on the same weekend and they pick themes. So they sort of set some challenges for these hackathons and way back in the beginning of 2014 they had a NASA Space Apps Challenge and one of the themes was satellite communication. So cut to Greece and a hackspace called Hackspace Greece in Athens, they went really imaginative with the name I think and a bunch of people got together and formed a team as part of this NASA Space Apps Challenge and they basically came up with this and what it was was it was this idea of, so you've got a satellite, you've got a cube sat or you've got a pocket cube, there's an amazing pocket cube builder in this very room in front of me. So you've got these satellites, these small satellites and they're zipping around the earth in low earth orbit maybe once every 90 minutes so they're travelling ridiculously quickly and a team has invested a load of time and money and has tried to make this thing that does something and returns some data from orbit and they want to be able to hear it. So the thing you build to hear it is basically like a radio but we call it a ground station and so lots of universities might build a mission and they build a ground station to try and hear their mission. The trouble is that these things are zipping past and they may only get like a couple of minutes whilst their satellite is overhead and that might only happen a couple of times a week. There may be great swears of time where because of the position of the satellite and the position of the earth they can't listen to the satellite. So the idea that we came up with all those years ago was well what if there was a sort of cheaper way to make ground stations but we could network them. So as something went over a ground station in America it could kind of get picked up there but then when it dropped out of that one maybe somebody else's could kind of pick it up and take over and we could if we have a network that are all connected we can massively increase our coverage. So I love that photo. This is this is my friend Pierros and this is one of the first ones that was built and this is on a rooftop in Athens which is sort of more romantic than sat up a mountain in Wales. But there we go. So this is Pierros and this is so one of the first iterations of the design. So there's two antennas. There's a box of gubbins with some motors in it and basically you can tell it when a satellite is going past that you're interested in and it will turn on a radio start recording but it will also track over the sky and follow it so you get a really nice signal to your antennas as it passes over. So that's kind of and this was of course all open source and they were trying to reduce the cost and the complexity so that other people could do this as well because we wanted to build this network. And then a brilliant thing happened. We published it on Hackaday and at the end of 2014 it won the Hackaday prize and it was the best year ever to win the Hackaday prize because they gave an amazing prize which was one. So you had a choice actually. We didn't take long to think about it. You could either claim as winners one ticket for one person to go to space on a private launch whenever that in the future became available or you could take what they had worked out to be the cash equivalent of what that was worth at the time. So being a load of space pirates we took the cash and it was a considerable amount of cash it was it was over if it was in great risk parents it would be over. I can't quite recall but it was something in the order of like 140,000 pounds or something like that so it was a it was a good lump of cash so we all had a mad crazy party. We all know we didn't we didn't. So this this happened and suddenly Satnogs this project that was just kind of largely confined to a few people around the world and centered around this hackspace in Greece kind of had a load of resources is disposal. So it was then that they kind of thought well there's loads of other things we could do to try and democratize space and to make it seem close to people and we've got some cash now so we need to set something up. So we became the Libra Space Foundation of which Satnogs is a is one of the projects. We cut to a couple of years later this is I love this image that somebody made somebody in our community made this is a just a month or a collage of of lots and lots of our ground stations around the world. It's not all of them by any means it's just a collection that was actually you can see people have done all kinds of designs and we have ones for different frequencies and some of them have ones that move and some of them have simpler ones that don't move. And then it's really started to grow and grow and grow. We have this this enormous network around the world and this is a little bit out of date now but this just shows this is if you went to our Satnogs website. This is the sort of landing page and it shows you this map sometimes takes a bit of time to load and that causes us more problems than some of the really clever space stuff if we're honest. But yeah you'll you'll see there's lots and lots and lots of ground stations all over the planet. But we do have some areas so if anybody knows anybody in North Canada Africa as well we have actually just off this picture we've got a couple down there but yeah any any contacted areas that have no no coverage there we'd love to talk to you. So locally this is where I live it's a bit of a weird website that you publish exactly where your house is if you have a ground station in your garden. So I was very proud to be the first person in North Wales to have a little ground station in my garden and it's interesting that you only need to sort of be the seed sometimes with things like this in our communities. If you're the first one in a new area and you're hoisting up a great thing or you've actually I'll show you later sent your your 12 year old daughter up a ladder to fix a big antenna onto a pole. Your name is what are you doing there and then they glaze over slightly to say oh it's a space ground station thing that I just do as a hobby. But it is true that once you start doing stuff you can usually locally other people will follow. So back to the Libraspace Foundation. So what other projects do we do? We'll come back to the Satnogs thing in a bit because I'd like to show you a little bit more under the hood of how a few little bits work. So the Libraspace Foundation we have this money. We have this network of satellite ground stations that listen to all manner of satellites that are up there. Lots of academic missions transmit their data openly and they love us because they get back to all the data that we collect goes off into a publicly accessible open source database. So the academics alike you return 100 times more data than we could have got on our own. So we solve a lot of problems for people and yeah so we've got this ground station network you can listen to all this stuff. What's next? So an opportunity arose it fell into our lap actually that we got the opportunity to build and fly our own CubeSat so our own satellite. So it kind of makes sense doesn't it? We've got all this listening gear at our disposal. Let's build the satellite and put it up there so we can sort of complete the loop almost. So this is a satellite that was built and flew and it's called UPSat or Upsat or if you're one of my colleagues from Greece they pronounce it Upsat which I think is just brilliant. So it's a sort of two and a half unit CubeSat so it's about this big and yeah it was interesting because it was part of this big emission called QB50 which this organisation basically wanted 50 of this certain type of radiation sensor to be flown in low Earth orbit. And what they did instead of just building 50 of their own CubeSats and chucking them up they sort of put it out to Tender and said anybody can build one of the ships so long as it interfaces this sensor sends the data back in this way and we welcome applications. So I won't mention who it is but an organisation applied and were accepted to build one. And they had around I think it was just short of three years to realise this project. Six months from the end of this when you're supposed to be sort of putting it in a box and very carefully and post it to the people they got in touch with us at Libraspace and said we haven't built it. It's all gone wrong. It's been a bit difficult really. We sort of bit off more than we can chew. Can you help us? So we sort of said okay well we've got some mechanical engineers involved in our group and we've got a lot of electronics engineers. Let's look at what you've got. This sort of small sketchbook of not very complete ideas came across and so it was quickly apparent that they didn't have very much. So we actually said we'd love to be involved in this but I don't think we can do it together. I think the only way we could kind of do this is if we took the project and kind of chucked our hacker ethic at it. So we had six worlds. We got this gig to build and launch a satellite and we started from nothing. So we literally opened, well it was a GitHub then. It's on GitHub now. We opened the repo with nothing in it. You know, read me. Builds, builds, satellite. Submit, commits. But we did have some money because we had this cash from the Hackaday prize. So we paid some of our kind of real key contributors who were available to give some time. So we started paying some of them to work on it. And also we leveraged the community. There were loads of people around the world just chucking little bits of work into this. A couple of hours here, a couple of hours there. But there was a core sort of in Greece and around Europe that were living this. There are people who still twitch when you talk about the UPSat development. But six months later, well four months later, away it went and it was deployed and we delivered on time. And the way that this one got launched was through a company that I think Ben mentioned in his. It's called NanoRacks. I mean it is quite technical but it is essentially a jack-in-the-box on the International Space Station, on a robot arm. And so it goes upon a rocket, they unpack it, they stick it in the International Space Station, you go on a jobs list and eventually they get down the jobs list, they unpack your thing, check all the things you've said, remember to plug that in and pull that out and do this. They put it in this jack-in-the-box and then at a very precise time and precise direction they push it out. So that's kind of the story. So it went up on this rocket. So this is an Atlas V with a Cygnus resupply mission. So I like to tell my kids that it went up and it was wrapped up in like the astronauts' pants and clean clothes and all that kind of stuff. Just because that's what children are for just to make nonsense off and let them believe it. But unfortunately it was delayed massively, delayed massively. It was integrated, packed in, all put in position and then it took about another, I think it was supposed to launch in like three months time but it took six months. We've all stopped this crazy period of work and we're like, my God did I plug that battery in? Did? When I soldered that, when I was drunk, was that a good idea? I don't know. So it's a nerve-wracking time. And then it got to the International Space Station and then it sat there for ages. And that was utterly heartbreaking and depressing and very difficult. But I've got a tip for you. So if you ever end up with a satellite on the International Space Station that you're waiting to get deployed by the astronauts on the International Space Station, the best thing you can do with your time is get on Twitter and talk to the astronauts on the International Space Station and blag them. And so when it launches, please, please, please, would you take some photographs of our satellite being launched and eventually go, if you just shut up, we'll do it. So the next slide, and I really hope it works because sometimes it doesn't, but it should work because it's on my computer, is a little animation made up of about 12 frames. So what you're about to see is our little tiny satellite, UP-Sat, at the back of three satellites getting chucked out into space off the International Space Station. We're at the back! And that is literally we annoyed an astronaut on the International Space Station to go, oh, God, it's that day where I'd better go and look up to her with my camera and take some photographs. Yeah, so there we go. So yeah, so we built that. What else do we do? We do loads of other things. We've got a whole set of repos that are... So I'm really interested in amateur high-power rocketry. I think it's a great STEM activity. Rockets, we saw in Ben's thing, rockets just evoke a great feeling of excitement, I feel. So we have a lot of stuff. We've got some repos around open-source, aviolics stuff to measure pressure, height to deploy different aspects of explosive charges that you use to break high-power rocketry stuff apart. So that's an ongoing project that we've got. One of my next speaking engagements after this is I'm going out to a thing called the open-source CubeSat workshop, which travels around each year. And this year it's actually out in Greece. And I'm going to be hosting a roundtable discussion with people from all over the world, hopefully if they come, because it's an optional roundtable, about how can we develop like a global open-source rocketry roadmap? I don't even know if it's worth doing. I don't know the answers at all. I'm going to have that discussion because we see things like, I don't know if you've heard of Copenhagen sub-orbitals, who are trying to build an amateur crewed, not crewed as in, it will have crew on it, not crewed as in like, whoa, crewed. They've got a crewed sub-orbital mission that they're trying to build as an amateur group. We've got all these interesting things, but what we haven't got is a truly open-source kind of approach to rocketry. So I do a lot of open-source rocketry. This is a picture of one of my rockets. It's not quite as impressive now after Ben's talk, is it? But in real life that's about this big. And the thing I love is I love completely scratch-building rockets. So everything on this is scratch-built apart from the motor, because as a member of the UK Rocketry Council, I have to inform you it's actually illegal to make solid rocket propellants in the UK as an amateur. But everything else, so the parachutes that it kicks out, is something I make because I'm that kind of... Well, some would say idiot, really. I'm that kind of idiot because what better use of my time than to stay up to three in the morning sewing a small crossform parachute on a sewing machine that I've laboriously done all the maths on where I could just buy one for $17.99. And I love talking about rockets. I love publishing stuff. So again, if you find me Concrete Dog or you find the Liberspace stuff, there's open repositories with rocket designs in. And also, it's not just an open design. We tend to use open-source toolpaths for everything. So like if you're looking at one of my rocket repos, the design simulation and flight simulations and stuff are all done in open-rockets, which is a free open-source application for designing rockets. All our electronic stuff is done in a keycap, which, of course, we send to Osh Park, the finest PCB fabricator. He's on the front row, I've got to say that. You'll get me. So yeah, so it's all up there. And then what else does Liberspace do? So this was a really pivotal move for us at Liberspace. This is a picture at the end of the first open-source Cubesat workshop, which I mentioned earlier. This was held out at... Oh, where was it held? Darnstads. So they have... Darnstads, that one, ESOC. Yeah, so it's the sort of... They do all the command and control stuff of stuff that's actually in space and orbiting miles and all that kind of stuff there. And that's where all the data comes back to for the European Space Agency. And they've got a big kind of conference suite there. And so we partnered with ESOC to deliver this open-source Cubesat workshop. And it brought people from all over the world. We had people from like these two gentlemen from JAXA, from the Japanese Space Agency. People from... I remember this young lady from Canada. It was a truly global meet-up. And it was interesting because it was one of the first things that ESOC has done that wasn't just industry. It had people like me there going, hello, I build rockets in my shed in North Wales. Through to high-end academics and all kinds of different people. The really interesting thing about it was... Well, there's two things that I found interesting. One is that I got to talk and that is just terrifying. I mean, it's terrifying speaking in front of anybody. But going on a stage at ESOC and just feeling like the least eminent person ever in front of this room. And then somebody just before I went on this guy who's a French guy who works for ESOC called Red. Red one came up to me and he went, you know they stream this to the ESOC and television channel? I've just checked. We have like 17,000 people watching. And then he handed me the microphone. Hello. Yeah, terrifying. But the interesting thing for Libraspace was that we became a known partner who could work with ESOC. So from this very simple thing of a workshop, partnering on a workshop that we wanted to deliver together it just meant that we were on their radar, on their systems as a partner that can be involved financially with the European Space Agency. So since then we've built on that relationship and we've actually started to receive quite a bit of funding for different projects from the European Space Agency, which is just mad when you think it's a group of hackers in a Greek basement. And now it's like, oh yeah, they've given us some money from the European Space Agency. So this, for example, is one of the projects that we're involved in and we're delivering. So ESOC gave us a chunk of money to basically address a load of things that they want developing to do with space applications for software-defined radios. And they realised that perhaps some of these little problems that they had weren't ever going to get solved in like big industry and it actually perhaps needed kind of small little kind of agile kind of groups to go, oh yeah, we're really good at that and we'd love to do it. But the passion for that will take that on. And this funding that Luba Space have allows us to give a little bit of funding. It's geographically sort of boxed into Europe. So what happens in a couple of months, I don't know, but there we go. But it means that we can give groups little bits of funding from us and sort of subcontract stuff from ESO via us to allow people to deliver these workloads that we manage and when the repos full of all the stuff that solves it to ESO to our satisfaction, we can send them in to ESO and fulfil our kind of obligations with them. So it's a fantastic opportunity. There's lots of little businesses and teams all around Europe working on some of this stuff. Oh, actually, I thought I had another slide there. Outrageous. We've also, so I'll do it off. We've just done a bit of partnership, just starting a really innovative bit of partnership with the Centre for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, which is the library of the Astrophysics Department. They've got this thing that they want to do about how metadata of all this data that comes from satellites kind of gets logged and what the sort of schema that what the metadata looks like. So things like that, we're starting to sort of broaden our kind of wings into other things. And it's largely because we have this big resource of data. We've got so much data from SATNOGs that it's a really useful tool for other academic sort of people to throw work out and develop. So back to SATNOGs. How am I doing on time? I'm all right, aren't I? I wanted to just give you, because loads of people hear me waffle on at great length and you're doing very well. None of you have fallen asleep yet, I don't think. But lots of people think it must be incredibly complex having a ground station in your garden and blah blah blah. And if there's one thing I want to leave you with today is that it's very simple. If people like me can do it, anybody can. So it's all on a website. So if you've logged in, you know, if you've signed up for Facebook or something, you can pretty much do the website stuff because it's dead easy. So basically you log in and you create an account. So this is me, that's my amateur radio call sign. You don't need one of those. There are stations on there that have lovely names of where they are. There are other ones that people have just put Jeff's station. You know, you can call them whatever you like. And basically you set up an account and then you can set up a station and you put in some details that you get off Google Maps about your location. You work out how high you are and you work out kind of what's the minimum horizon. So that means if you're between two buildings your horizon is going to be a higher number because you can't see as much of the sky. If you live halfway up a mountain you don't know what to put. So you just put in 10 because on one side I get nothing but on the other side I get everything. So that's all that is. You put in some details about the type of area that you have which means which frequencies you're available to listen to and you kind of click submit and you get a little dot on the map. On the website once your station is up and running if I scroll down from where we were before, this is what I would see. So it automatically uses loads and loads of open source software. It uses things like G predict and loads of new radio modules and all this kind of stuff and it pulls together a three day long list that continually updates so you can get three days worth of these into the future and what these are are these are past predictions of things that are going to go over your station. So wherever your station is is sort of represented in the middle here and each one of these is a satellite that's going over here that's making this journey between these times on that particular date. And nobody... we track thousands and thousands and thousands of satellites so nobody remembers what all of these are. I know what that one is because it says ISS so there's a good chance that's the International Space Station. I've maybe been into it long enough that I know what a few others are but I totally don't know. So we've made it that if you click on one of these you get a nice pop-up that tells you a little bit about the satellite that's going past. So this is an amateur radio satellite called Fox 1B and it gives you some sort of the success rate of people hearing it when they've made an observation and some of the details about it. So it's all pretty kind of usable. So if you think, oh yes, that's good it's going over my house I'm interested in that you would then click the schedule button and you simply get a little checkbox really it gives you the same information it shows you sort of on a timeline where it's going to be some of the satellites have different transmitters that transmit on different frequencies or do different bands or do different data on different transmitters so you might get a drop-down selection here that you select what you want to listen to when you're all ready you click schedule the observation was successfully scheduled you'll get this page that should unless you click the big delete button in the corner this should just exist forever and basically it's got some details about your station and what the observation is of and then it's empty because it's not done the observation yet it's going to happen in the future so you've got a waterfall tab an audio tab and a data tab so when you come back after the allotted time everything's gone well the doohickey in the box in your garden has turned on it's recorded some audio it's sent it to the web it's been stored and it produces an image of the audio of course then you can click the audio tab and you'll get an audio wave of the recording with the data in it if that's some sort of data when you click play it may sound like a ZX Spectrum loading a game for the BPSK fans that was a secret message for you all but also we do have some observations that are audio so for example I'm going to play in a little bit I've got some clips of audio listening to the astronauts on the International Space Station so it could be audio and then you might click the data one so the data might just be frames of data that don't really do much but it might be what's my next slide actually before I give the game away so there might be frames of data and then all those frames of data get stored on the Satnogs database which is again this open public database that anybody can go into and use sometimes data might be images and it might be decoded here but the other thing that lots of our members of our community are really into at the moment is we send all this stuff into our database and then members of the community get a satellite that they're interested in and they build a dashboard usually using a tool called Grafana if any of you are interested in that kind of stuff it's quite a popular tool at the moment and they'll build a dashboard that nicely displays the stuff that's in the data it will decode it if they've shared those details from the mission of how to decode it and they'll decode it and stuff so the next one I'm going to show you is a nice one this is the University of Texas launched a cubesat that they called Armadillo apparently you have to say it like that on Twitter so this is sort of there's other stuff on the dashboard that's maybe more sexy but it's got some stuff about times and frames and it's got some stuff about the frame count and stuff but the thing that they did, you can't really see this but the thing that they did which is kind of really excited some amateur radio people is at the end of every data package they've put a quote from the game Portal 2 ill so this dashboard we've built just comes up with quotes from Portal 2 which just continually populate these random silly lies like there's one that just goes pfft whatever brilliant the situation is hopeless oh there's one that just repeats don't like space, don't like space they're all quotes from Portal 2 but the interesting thing about that is that it really energises the community because they're like it's not just a load of dry data coming back they're like oh I've got to schedule that observation because what's in it tonight or this week or whatever the other thing that we get is we do a lot of the weather satellite images are open and available for anybody to have and there's this beautiful thing this beautiful thing that you can do so you can work out when there's going to be a really nice weather image over your area of the world so like for me it will be Wales and the UK and some of Europe and you can work out that sometimes that everything aligns sounds like I'm going to be a bit cosmic now but everything aligns that you've got an observation coming over just as the sun is rising and you're going to be able to get like a dawn image of above where you live and it will show all the mountains and shadow and stuff so this happened once for me and I was like oh this is going to be amazing I'm going to get like we have to see the Pyrenees maybe and the Alps and there was shadows and there will be the UK and there will be Wales and of course it was cloudy totally cloudy but there we go so yeah but we get lots and lots and lots of different types of data including this brilliant program run by amateur radio enthusiast around the world called ARIS which enables school children to talk via amateur radio to the international space station and we regularly record the side that comes back from the international space station we link it back to ARIS so that they have a record of the conversations so these are all taken, the next two clips are two short audio clips you've got to remember this audio has come from space and been picked up by an antenna in my Welsh garden so it's not the best of audio quality but it's not too bad and the first one I believe is a gentleman on the international space station called Scott's Tingle that's a name isn't it and he's talking about his ride up can you imagine being like a 12 year old 13 year old at high school people turning up, setting up all these aerials and they're like chatting to a lesser and they're like yeah and then we're after the races that's a really cool project the next one's about it sounds rather pleasant isn't it cuisine of the world so there we go we get into the end now but I just wanted to chuck a couple of slides in I showed this picture earlier of this big moving tracking one and lots and lots of people in our community do build these but a more common entry point is for people to build a static one so I wanted to just show you what I have in my garden there we go it's a rare day all the Greek team didn't believe that this was my ground station because there was blue sky in it the Greeks in our team just think it's grey here continually so yeah this is my ground station in Wales it's on a scaffolding pole quite a long scaffolding pole that I've cemented into the garden I know my partner loves me and it has a small waterproof box and this is actually a commercial antenna but you can lots of people make it even cheaper by building antennas themselves this as I told you my daughter I think it's essential that young women have ladder skills I don't know where that's quite come from but I just felt it was very important and Seren my daughter loves it she loves going up and tinkering and she loves listening to the stuff that's coming back from it and looking at the data so it's nice that it's become a family thing even though my partner again is like why is she up a big ladder but in the box there's nothing too too exciting this is sort of the equivalent kit but on the desk so there's a waterproof box there's a Raspberry Pi which needs an SD card with a special image that we've got on our satnav's website there's a couple of clumps to put it on the pole some cables we do a thing called power over ethernet which means that it gets its power and its internet connection through one cable so you only have to drill one hole in your cable end and as I say this is a commercial antenna that we use usually well either if you've got the money or if you're building one to install in somewhere else it's just a quicker way to do it but lots of people build these with like home built antennas built out of all kinds of cheap and findable materials so yeah that's just that's kind of it you need an internet connection and some stuff that I would guess quite a few of you probably have in your homes or lares already so yeah that's me I write for Hackspace magazine and there's a massive feature on Libra Space Foundation that you can get in issue 18 of Hackspace magazine which you can download for free all the Hackspace magazines come out this download every article there's only 22 issues so far and I hope they continue but they're all worth reading but issue 18 has got a load of stuff about space and the Libra space that's my email find me on Twitter somebody else has got concrete dog with an O so you have to put a zero in that's me thank you very much