December Is Space Month on Hackster

December is Space Month on Hackster! Throughout this month we’ll feature all kinds of interesting space-related content including tiny satellites, high-altitude balloons, space rovers, and projects from our community that are out of this world.

A call to share projects

There is a wide range of technologies contributing to advancements in space research and exploration. We’ve seen so many stellar projects on Hackster that are pushing the boundaries of space innovation, including a virtual electronic finderscope, EDF rockets, and even a device that tracks the location of the International Space Station. Share your space-related project by uploading your work on Hackster. Use one of the following tags and your project will also appear on our Astronomy topic page.

• Astronomy
• Planets
• Telescope
• Space
• Satellite

Share your space content on social media and use #hacksterio or tag our @hacksterio handle on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter so we can share your work with the global developer community.

Watch Hackster Café interviews with talented innovators

Hackster Café is a livestream series hosted by Hackster's in-house personality Alex Glow every Tuesday at 10am PST. To join the live feed and ask questions, subscribe to Hackster's YouTube channel and you'll be notified when the link is live. Check out all recorded episodes at hackster.io/videos.

Ted Tagami / Magnitude.io (12/13)

Ted Tagami is the Education Chair of the User Advisory Committee for the International Space Station US National Lab and co-founder of Magnitude.io. Magnitude.io is a Berkeley, CA-based organization that conducts awesome experiments on the International Space Station and empowers students globally with STEM opportunities to participate in astrobotany research. They're currently working on "ExoLab-10: Carbon Farmer", which among many pieces of the mission, studies potential crop production of legumes for deep space missions.

Hangout and Nerdout (12/15)

Stay tuned to hear which experienced developers in the space-exploration field will join the panel and present their work on our livestream on December 15th. Stay tuned to learn how to register.

Throwback to early Hackster years

Watch our September in Space video playlist, which includes interviews with four notable engineers and developers who share their experiences working in the space industry. Some of our earlier work, but the experiences are just as cool as they were in 2016.

Read the latest news on space projects and hardware

New space applications continue to open incredible discoveries. Find out how space exploration technology has progressed recently:

TeamAir's CanSat Packs a Raspberry Pi Pico in a Tiny Simulated Satellite - Designed to simulate the design of a tiny satellite, but with a payload for in-atmosphere operations, this CanSat uses a five-board layout.

NASA, Microchip, SiFive Announces Partnership for RISC-V Spaceflight Computing Platform - Designed to replace existing systems still using a processor design from 1997, the RISC-V-powered chip will offer 100 times the performance.

The KEYSME Lunar 01 Is the Perfect Mechanical Keyboard for Space Enthusiasts - Like space stuff and mechanical keyboards? Then today is your lucky day, because you can back the new KEYSME Lunar 01 on Kickstarter now.

Ken Shirriff's Reverse Engineering Skills Produce a Schematic for the Apollo Premodulation Processor - Continuing a mission to reverse engineer schematics for Apollo spaceflight technology, Ken Shirriff's latest target is a communications box.

T-Zero Systems' Teensy-Equipped Model Falcon 9 Boasts Genuine Thrust Vector Control Stabilization - Designed to stabilize the rocket, this Teensy-powered payload handles TVC while also capturing data from an IMU and barometer.

Learn more about our partners' stellar work

Our partners in the open source hardware and broader technology industries have made huge progress in space exploration, celestial research, and other areas that give people more insights into our universe.

In 2020, AMD Xilinx launched the first 20nm space-grade FPGA for satellite and space applications named the Xilinx® Radiation Tolerant (RT) Kintex® UltraScale™ XQRKU060 FPGA. Its ML capabilities allow satellites to update in real-time, deliver video-on-demand, and perform compute “on-the-fly” to process complex algorithms. The FPGA’s increase in performance and resiliency in space also gives researchers and organizations better flexibility in the deployment of satellites, space telescopes, and other projects which can range from low-orbit to deep-space missions. Feel free to geek out by reading through the white paper and exploring its datasheet.

Amazon Web Services has pushed research and exploration to new levels by enabling rovers on Mars to collect data more efficiently, scaling satellite operations, and more initiatives in the world of space. Check out AWS’s video with astronaut Peggy Whitson on how they’re enabling astronauts and scientists to complete more research in space.

In April of this year, Infineon Technologies announced the first space-qualified, radiation-hardened, serial interface F-RAM devices. These are specifically designed for data logging mission-critical data, telemetry storage, and command and control calibration data storage in satellites and other space missions in orbit. These devices use less power and fewer components than previously available hardware while increasing the performance of data storage and the endurance of technology in extreme environments. Pretty rad.

Sony's Spresense microcontroller board was launched into space in November 2021 as part of a payload for the mission in the program Innovative Satellite Technology Demonstration No. 2 on the RAISE-2 satellite by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). This mission tested the durability of Spresense in space and used Spresense on-board technologies to estimate the altitude of the launched satellite. Read more about the results of the mission and its progress here.

Though it launched in 2014, one service you should check out during space month is IFTTT’s space integrations, which make space news more accessible by delivering notifications when the ISS passes over a user, when an astronaut enters space, when breaking news on NASA comes out, and even making the NASA photo of the day your phone’s wallpaper. Do you need that? Yes, you do. It's space month!

Stay tuned for announcements, more projects, and space news throughout the month!