Ask HN: How can an ordinary programmer contribute to space exploration?

8 points by Alekhine ↗ HN
I've always been fascinated by space and would like nothing more than to see humanity spread to the stars. How can I, as an ordinary citizen with programming skills, contribute to this without joining NASA or SpaceX? Are there open source projects I can contribute to or perhaps a lobby I can donate to?

5 comments

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We often share projects on Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com). Some ideas:

- Work with https://satnogs.org/ to build an open source ground station network. - Check out https://www.opensourcesatellite.org/ - KubOS is an open source flight OS in Linux & Rust. - work on tracking bolides with AMS (https://www.amsmeteors.org)

What are your skills? There's tons of work to be done using Earth observation data and space data for interesting things.

I'm a novice. I would not use my code for anything even remotely important, but I do have very good writing skills.
Your whole post is about how you can contribute your programming skills, so maybe you should rephrase it.