One Flag in Space | Similar organizations | Forum

Post edited 2:08 pm – December 11, 2009 by Luke Maurits

Interesting discovery.  The One Flag in Space project is a simple effort to convince the spaceflight community to stop putting the national flags of countries on rockets, spacecraft and space suits, and instead adopt a "blue marble" flag showing the planet Earth:

Their hope is that this "would send a universal message that space exploration is done for the benefit of humanity as a whole, not just space-faring nations.  We believe that one day, at least in space, our planet will be working together for the benefit of everyone".

This sounds like the kind of thing that we should try to support, I think of this sentiment as being very much in the spirit of CSTART.

How would people feel about putting a section in our Social Contract called "dedication to international unity", saying that:

1. All our rockets, spacecraft and spacesuits shall display the blue marble flag.
2. No flag of any nation shall be displayed on any of our rockets, spacecraft or spacesuits.

Note that the Open Luna Foundation, who I have posted about elsewhere in this forum, have decided to support the One Flag in Space mission.  The OFIS site has a link to the OLF site displayed on it fairly prominently – I bet if we put these points in our social contract, we could get a link put there too, which could be good publicity.

I had a feeling you'd agree with this sentiment.  I will provisionally add these points to the Wiki, if anybody is really unhappy with them for some reason, do speak up.

Although, I really support this idea.

But lets say in future when we need a dedicated launch site and a particular country would like to donate some land in the spirit of the project. They would certainly want a flag of their country somewhere. How do we tackle that? Or do we just cross the river when we come to it? Any thoughts?

Post edited 1:18 am – January 10, 2010 by Luke Maurits

Great news!  Today I got a reply from Sanjoy Som, the executive director of OFIS, to an email I sent him some time ago (which it looks like I forgot to mention sending here – whoops!  I was just asking about CSTART and OFIS becoming official partners in the same way that OLF and OFIS is).  Sanjoy said:

Thank you for your interest in partnering with us. I read with great interest your website and salute your initiative! An open source space agency is very ambitious and has great potential, so we would be thrilled to partner with you in this endeavor. 

Thank you for adding the OFiS initiative link on your website. I will add CSTART logo in the partners box on the OFiS website.

Please consider placing  the Blue Marble logo in renderings that you will do as part of your development campaign such as CLLARE.

You can now see the CSTART name and logo on the OFIS website!  Not only that, but OFIS have made Facebook and Twitter updates about the partnership.  The have 524 members of their FB group, so this is a great exposure for us to a group of people who we can be confident are interested in space exploration, which are the kind of people we will need to recruit from, at least at first.

I think it should be no problem to start including the Blue Marble logo in our renderings of the CLLARE stack.

We should also consider placing a notice of our partnership somewhere on our website.  I'm not quite sure where this should go, OFIS don't really qualify as a "Friend of CSTART" under the current conditions since they do not actually engage in space exploration or research.  A small mention somewhere on the front of cstart.org may be more appropriate – i have been thinking lately that cstart.org is too bare at first.  We should have a link from the front page directly to the CLLARE and OHKLA Wiki pages, rather than relying on people finding the front page interesting enough for them to bother clicking on the "Wiki" link.

I'll do our own set of tweets/FB/blog updates about this soon.