Today I want to share with you an idea that has been going around in my head all week: to create a “nation” on a server mounted on a stratospheric balloon.
Technically it is possible to do it using current techniques and materials, and it is relatively quick to finance and build.
The “only” problem I see is the Chinese government using their anti-satellite missiles and shooting down the balloon.
This is not the first time an attempt has been made to create a nation on the internet, or on a cryptocurrency network.
MoneroSpace aims to build a decentralized censorship-resistant satellite communication network through open-source hardware and encryption protocols, achieving:
Global Ubiquitous Access: Providing Monero transaction channels for regions without terrestrial networks (e.g., oceans, polar areas) and censored zones (e.g., Iran, Syria).
Physical-Layer Censorship Resistance: Bypassing internet blockades with low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites to ensure independent transaction broadcasting.
Community-Driven Ecosystem: Open-sourcing satellite hardware designs and communication protocols to enable third-party node deployment.
Seems like the creators behind it are sketchy at best. They say a lot what they are going to do, how they will be transparent. A lot of their links go to sites not up anymore.
I don’t think that existing nations would interpret the Outer Space treaty that way. It explicitly says “A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body”. So I think it is unlikely many states would recognise it as an independent sovereign nation, rather than being under the jurisdiction of an existing nation (similar to water and aircraft).
You’d also need to either have finite flight duration (I think months is state-of-the-art) or try to replenish leaking hydrogen from electrolysis of air moisture, using solar energy - all in a rather limited weight budget. That might be possible, but it would take a lot of research. It might actually be more possible, with enough funding, to launch a CubeSat and transfer it into a circular medium earth orbit. That orbit would passively last thousands of years. Its latency wouldn’t be great due to the distance, and its energy budget would be very limited by the solar power it can sustainably gather - but for a high-value, high-latency trusted third party that is very difficult even for nation states (including the one with nominal sovereignty) to tamper with, it could be an option.
Of course, if anyone on the ground has a key authorising update of the satellite code, they could go after them. And they could try some kind of jamming / DoS or exploit against it (depending on what it does) - if no one can update the software, the attackers have an advantage, especially over a tiny, distant and low-power device. So the use case would need to be carefully thought out.
That’s something I didn’t consider the first time. The good part is that not all countries signed that treaty: most countries signed the treaty and ratified it, some countries only signed it but did not ratify it, and a very small number of countries neither signed nor ratified it.
I guess we will have to go to countries like Equatorial Guinea or Somalia to be able to launch the balloon without too many problems. We could say that it is a “stratospheric balloon with scientific equipment” and that’s it.
Money was the first obstacle I encountered: launching a CubeSat is prohibitively expensive, so I thought of a stratospheric balloon as a cheaper alternative. In addition, replacing the balloon in case of downing would also be cheap.
As for the duration of the flight, the only thing cheap enough, is to make a careful calculation of the liters of hydrogen to make the balloon fly, and a weight reduction of the payload. The problem is that at higher altitude the density changes drastically, causing the balloon to expand until it explodes. That is the reason why weather balloons have a parachute attached to the payload: to be able to retrieve the scientific instrumentation when the balloon explodes. For now the best I have is to put in less hydrogen so that the balloon will expand without exploding.
The use I want to give it is that of “flying safe”, just to store data.
According to the Montevideo Convention, for a state to be formed you need a defined territory and people living there, so in this case the people can be substituted by PGP keys that will “live” inside a microSD card, and the territory can be substituted by the area of a PCB.
The architecture I have in mind is weird, but I think it will work well. The central element will be a microcontroller (imagine an ATmega328P-PU like the one in Arduino), connected to two microSD cards. The microcontroller will be programmed with a modified Forth interpreter, which will read the source code from one of the microSD cards, and run it in RAM. It’s like an RTOS but with dynamic expansion capability. I expect that will extend the life of the microSD. Communication with ground will be done with a 27 MHz citizens band transceiver.v To save batteries, the balloon circuitry will only be activated when a command is sent to it.