The story surfaced when the BBC reported on the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. The purpose, according to activist Nick Farr, is to take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities: “The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space.”
The idea has evolved from the Chaos Communication Camp 2011 last summer. “A modern manifest of cyberspace” proposed abandoning the existing infrastructure and urged “the deployment of darknets and encrypted tunnels layered over the existing commercial internet.” This was to be supported by a grass-roots telecommunications satellite network.
Now the idea has evolved into the Hackerspace Global Grid (HGG), with the ambitious “goal of putting a hacker on the moon 23 years from CCCamp11”. Before dismissing the idea, consider what has happened in the last 23 years of technology.
“We want to build a distributed network of ground stations to receive satellite communications. The first step is establishing a means of accurate synchronization for the distributed network. Next up are building various receiver modules (ADS-B, amateur satellites, etc) and data processing of received signals. A communication/control channel (read: sending data) is a future possibility but there are no fixed plans on how this could be implemented yet.”
The project is based on the existing power of the cloud and individual co-operation learned and exploited by open-source projects. It declares itself to be international and non-partisan. “What we are is a bunch of tech-savvy folks who identified a problem and are eager to fix it. We're interested in the technological aspects of all things communication... We're a representative slice of humankind.”
But let’s not underestimate the technological problems they will need to solve. Apart from all the difficulties in financing and developing ground stations and satellites, there’s a little problem of latency involved with satellite telecommunications: we have all come to appreciate the speed of our cable-based internet.