Building in the open at the edge of space

I’ve spent a long time convinced that the fastest way to understand a system is to take it apart, and that the fastest way to actually learn something is to be forced to teach it. This site is what happens when you point both of those beliefs at the same target: the systems we depend on in orbit.

Space infrastructure runs more of daily life than most people realize — timing, navigation, imagery, communications, the backbone of entire economies — and yet the gap between how critical these systems are and how well they’re publicly understood is enormous. A lot of the knowledge lives behind clearances, behind paywalled standards, or inside the heads of people who don’t write much down. I want to close that gap in the only way I know how: by working through it in public, out loud, with my mistakes left in.

So here’s the plan, and it’s not complicated. I’m going to research, secure, and attack space systems — satellites, ground stations, the RF links between them, the protocols that hold the stack together — and I’m going to publish the work as it happens. Not polished retrospectives written six months after the fact, but the actual path: the FlatSat bench coming together, the SDR captures that didn’t decode, the hardware bring-up that fought me for a week, and the security findings that came out the other side.

A few things you can expect from this site:

• Hands-on RF and SDR. Real signal reception, satellite tracking, decoding work — with the gear, the settings, and the failures documented.
• Hardware security. Bring-up, analysis, and teardown of the boards and radios that make these systems run.
• Original research, published as it lands. When I find something, it goes here first.
• A weekly space wrap-up. Launches, security disclosures, satellite movement, and the current events worth tracking — now live, every week.

The bet underneath all of it is that doing this in the open is strictly better than doing it alone. Teaching forces clarity. Publishing invites correction. And a community that argues with you about RF and orbital mechanics is worth more than any private notebook.

Consider this the opening entry. The site itself is a work-in-progress — expect it to change as the labs grow. If any of this is your thing, the work is where the projects live, and the RSS feed is the best way to follow along.

More to come. A lot more.