Reach For The Stars with Spacehack

Tired of sitting alone staring up at the stars? Spacehack could be for you.

Spacehack is a collaborative portal for anyone with a passing interest in the extraterrestrial.

Created earlier this year by ex-NASA program co-ordinator Ariel Waldman, Spacehack brings together individual enthusiasts and teams from around the world to work together on a diverse range of open-source initiatives.

In 2008, Congressional funding was approved which specifically directed NASA to “facilitate participation by the public” in its national space programs. On this basis, space fans from around the globe can communicate and learn together through the competitions, events and open-source projects that regularly form part of everyday life at Spacehack.

Visitors can track their favourite projects via RSS or Twitter and can even propose their own participatory projects and encourage others to join in.

The famous SETI@HOME project, which encourages users to donate spare processing capacity in their PCs to the number-crunching required in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has a place in the Spacehack portal. Also here is the Google Lunar X competition offering a $20m prize to the first team to safely land a robot on the Moon, travel 500 meters and send images and data back to Earth.

Alternatively, you might fancy having a go at entering a moonbuggy race in Alabama or simply want to join the search for interstellar dust particles from home. Either way, Spackhack could be for you.

photo: blyzz (cc)