Smash the Hotels! Squat the Moon!
Daniel Oberhaus, Vice/Motherboard, April 23, 2015
The idea is simple: we’re going to take back outer space from the military industrial complex and make it available to everyone. The weapons employed in the struggle will consist of rocket engines, imagination, and a dance floor. The first step will be to create a global network of autonomous, community-based space programs. We have five years to make this happen.
These were the stipulations laid down by an unlikely group of astronauts who, 20 years ago today, had gathered in the shadow of the Copper Horse statue in Windsor Great Park to watch a weather balloon fade into the slate-colored English skies.
The group, which largely consisted of anarchists, musicians, and artists with a penchant for the absurd, had rendezvoused at Windsor on April 23, 1995 to ceremonially inaugurate what would become the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA): a non-hierarchical, non-governmental international space program committed to radically altering the way we think about life on Earth, space exploration, and the connection between the two.
