On the 5 Oct 2015, Space Town Hall celebrated its one year old! It happened to be on the UN declared World Space Week too. It was a feast for our ears, eyes and having the pleasure to hold a spacecraft in our hand, plus beer, games and cakes!

We started with a game over networking and went into the most accessible content at Space Town Hall to date. The content we have at our birthday clearly illustrated the way we would like to go forward going: more diversity where space is part of every profession! Take a look at Minna Nygren explaining the process of translating scientific photos to graphic score:

Not only that we get to understand the process of composing a graphical music score, we also get to hear a full playback of Charon and Pluto, a Planetary Waltz, a very beautiful piece by Catherine Kontz and Minna Nygren. The piece was commissioned by the Center of Planetary Science, the new work received its premiere on the 24th of June 2015 at An Evening with the Planets event at UCL by pianists Valentina Pravodelov and Kerry Yong. All that, plus a tale of collaboration between two accomplished contemporary classical music composers in the world where superstar-ness is valued above all. After enjoying the beautiful music, we dialed our our guest from San Francisco in for a chat: Ryan Holmes, CEO of SpaceVR, a recently successfully funded kickstarter project to bring space experience to everyone to the ground, using virtual reality! See what I mean? Space is not always about going out there, it's also about bringing the experience in! Many congratulations again Ryan, looking forward to seeing your cameras off into International Space Station and beyond.

On the note of sending things into space, we also have Rob Karpinski, a committed maker who DIY'ed many things electronics including an open-sourced satellite! Rob is also our regular participant at DIY Spacecraft Controls and a member of Cambridge Makerspace. We had a very accessible history lesson on satellites, specifically on their sizes. Look at this satellite, it's 5 cm widel: 

All photos by Daniel Elson.

Presentation from Rob can be found here.

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Finally, thanks to our venue sponsor Impact Hub Westminster and their very friendly and professional team for hosting us, Citizen Inventor for sponsoring the food and drink, a special thanks to Daniel for photography.

See you next time for more space inspiration.

So the DIY spacecraft control that happens roughly one Saturday per month has been extended into a full festival - the Galactic Fête! Headlined by our 2 spacecraft learning FREE event, we've decided to extend the weekend to more friends, family and more creative people with a relaxed, summer festival spirit. Thanks to Create Space London for being extremely supportive and receptive to this massive extension to the original plan of the 2 spacecraft learning events - not only that we get to use the usual venue at Wembley Point, we are also getting to have a star party and crash over in their new building nearer to Wembley Park and a lot of exciting makerspace workshop from Create Space London's in house experts too!

So what is it?

It's started unconventionally and it is going to be an otherworldly fête! Galactic Fête is the first summer festival celebrating the mix of space, art and maker culture. It's all about creativity! 18/19 July LONDON. It is a bit short noticed but let's face it, there's never a perfect time to do things in life, so we cracked on. We hope you will take the action too and come and enjoy a day or two at the weekend festival.

The common thing about space, art and maker culture is inspiration. Who doesn't want to have some inspiration in a relaxed, merry, summer weekend?!

With inspiration comes creativity. Ever had the trouble of not knowing where to start implementing with your new idea or think that you are not in a place to do so? Creation, needs skills, at least a rough idea of. Here's where the maker culture helps - with its focus on using and learning practical skills and applying them. Now, that sounds like hard work, too much hard work for the weekend, at least. 

Or is it? 

At Galactic Fête, we will break it down and provide that a gentle starting point to creativity by giving you a variety of experiences in bite-sized hands-on workshops, smoothed by the refreshments and games. There will be a spectrum of activities ranging from getting yourself transformed into a space cat on portrait, to screen-printing, laser cutting your own space themed masterpiece, to hands on learning to build spacecrafts. We have something for you regardless of where you are on your journey. On Saturday evening, we'll have a star party - where you can observe the sky, top up with more food and enjoy one of the many crafty things of the weekend: craft beer.  All that, at an unbelievably affordable price. 

You, your family (children too) and friends are invited to come relaxed and celebrate creativity in action, at this art/space merry. You are more creative than you think!

Tickets: http://www.galacticfete.org/

Time:  18 Jul 10:30 - 19 Jul 17:00

Venue: Create Space London (Nearest station: Stonebridge Park, or a 20 minutes walk from Wembley Park)