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The League of the Anchovy changes its statutes, name, and logo to become a tool for the network that was born over this last year.

A little more than a year ago, we took a radical turn: we refounded our life-long association, the Library of the Indies. With Juan Urrutia, Neal Gorenflo, Matt Scales, Antonin Leonard and other friends—all of them cutting-edge people and pioneers in collaborative consumption, the direct economy, P2P production, free software, etc.—we took a very Cantabrian myth, the birth of the anchovy, and convened our network to Gijón to ask ourselves how to reach “beyond the Sharing Economy” and turn all those ideas and explorations into real opportunities for growth.

We called it the “League of the Anchovy,” because we thought that it would develop, above all, as a way of working among groups to join resources and reach concrete accomplishments. Our main contribution at that time was to bring the development of Bazar towards the standard of distributed communication that the Free Software Foundation was promoting: the OStatus protocol and GNU-Social. Then la Matriz was born, and we develop its connection with blogs and promoted what, the day after tomorrow, Wednesday the seventh, will be the first “GNU-social Camp.”

The result was not a league of groups, but an extraordinarily active network with a much richer conversation than anyone could have expected. It is a club facilitated by the Indianos that has not stayed at the talking stage, but rather, has already begun to produce innovation, giving it the form of code and initiatives.

The day after tomorrow, we will begin Somero 2015, the great convening of our network. We’re beginning a new year, and we want do it with a new skin that reflects change and growth.

So we members of “the League of the Anchovy” approved a change in statutes, allowing the members of the network to be integrated into the association and make it theirs. The name itself will reflect the change, becoming “Las Indias Club ~ The League of Abundance“; the main domain will be lasindias.club and will become a space that is self-managed by the network of members; Somero will officially become our annual conference, and the logo will go from being our dear traveling anchovy to a pomegranate about to burst with thousand seeds.

What better symbol we could have?

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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The P2P mode of production is already opening the door to a society of abundance. You can stop being a consumer. You can stop being passive and letting the things you buy define your identity. You can switch sides… and produce.

Looking back now, it seems clear that the P2P mode of production started to take shape at the end of the ’90s, when the emergence of Linux turned free software into a social and productive phenomenon of the first order. At the time, however, few would have gone so far. Most people were focused on something which was also important, and which links it with the logic and ethics of abundance: its origin in the hacker movement.

For hackers, knowledge in itself is a cause for production and in general, for life and work in community. They don’t learn to produce more or better, they produce to know more. Because learning is their motivation, their life can’t be divided up into working time and “free” time. All time is free and therefore productive, because hackers defend multispecialization as a lifestyle. Freedom is their main value, as the materialization of personal autonomy and community. Hackers don’t demand that others—governments or institutions—do what they consider must be done; they do it themselves, directly. If they demand anything, it’s that obstacles of any kind (monopolies, intellectual property, etc.) that prevent them or their community from addressing production be removed.

In this framework of values, the first major victory of free software took place: building a complete free operating system, Linux. Never again would the hacker movement be part of the underground. A new electronic commons appeared before the eyes of millions of people. Soon, profoundly but quickly, this forever changes the hottest industry of the previous decade. It would go from a few large-scale businesses to a far-reaching system with many small groups, projects and companies that rested on a unique, but multiform, diverse and dynamic commons.

Not long after that, the cycle and the structure of free software production would appear in other fields. Not coincidentally, the production of immaterial cultural objects—music, literature, and audiovisual creation—took advantage of P2P technology before others. But for just that reason, it had also suffered attacks from new laws on intellectual property called for by the large-scale culture industry.

The P2P production cycle

In this model, the center of the cycle is the knowledge commons: immaterial, free and freely usable for all. This is the characteristic form of capital in production between peers. From this starting point, new projects are born. Because there’s no central authority, there can be evolutions of previous projects in the commons—including customizations for concrete needs—or, different, truly new objectives can be spelled out. This way, new knowledge is produced in the process of its materialization and development.

Each new contribution incorporates directly to the commons, the center of P2P accumulation, but also enters the market, where it may possibly appear incorporated into customization, production and maintenance services sold by small businesses or individuals.

It’s important to point out the extent to which the market and capital are defined in a fundamentally different way in the P2P mode of production from the current system. The key to understanding it is the concept of “rent.” Rent is all extraordinary benefit, created outside of the market, by the place occupied by the business. “Natural” monopolies—normally created by over-scaling—legal monopolies (like intellectual property) and deals for regulatory favor are the most common origins of business rents.

All these rents disappear in the P2P production cycle. As Juan Urrutia had predicted, only one rent remains: the one produced temporarily by innovation. Anyone who creates new technologies or products has a short time to take advantage of their solitude in the market before the fact that the new knowledge has entered the commons allows others to make offers based on it, “dissipating” rents from innovation for its creators and starting the cycle once again, without any advantages for anyone.

Because, at the limit, the market only pays the value of the work contained in services, the businesses need to innovate constantly to win short temporary rents from successive innovations. That’s why the P2P mode of production is a true abundance-producing machine, which accumulates in the form of a ever-growing and universally usable knowledge commons. And all without any need for central control, hierarchy or large-scale organizations.

From the immaterial to the material

Ten years ago, talking about designing and producing objects without being a captain of industry would have sounded like madness or a symptom of over-exposure to science fiction novels. In a world that was enjoying the first glimpses of abundance in intangible goods after the digital revolution, the very idea of physical production felt like a throwback to an era that felt outdated and limiting; something that,while it kept functioning, it was out of the simple need to provide everyday objects: cars, computers, and appliances of all kinds.

In 2008 two teams, one at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, and other in las Indias, competed to complete the development of the “RepRap,” a machine capable of printing objects, up to and including replicating itself. Soon, the repositories of free knowledge also began orienting themselves towards the world of production. At first, limited by the machines themselves and the materials they use, pieces of small size proliferated: figurines and models for board games were the most popular objects of the first repositories.

With the “RepRap,” the first step was taken towards the factory at home. Quite naturally, 3D printers would turn hardware and design into natural allies of free software. In fact, the most important thing is that the new field replicated—for goods closer and closer to industrial production—the cycle of P2P production.

It’s not just that a new mode of producing is being consolidated, it’s that it’s sustained by the great economic and technological trends of our time, which it also drives. This whole immaterial commons maintained on the Internet will accelerate the reduction of the optimum scale of production more and more, until it turns the 3D printer into the symbol of a future of very high productivity and very small scale, which can already be sensed.

The Direct Economy and P2P Production feed each other

The possibility of using free knowledge—with a starting price of zero—substantially reduces the capital necessary to launch a company. Software, patents, technical training… all things that were substantive parts of the business plan of any SME in the ’90s, and which justified a good part of the investment, simply begin to fade. One of the main obstacles to starting a project of industrial production, capital, decreases substantially. What Marx had thought of as the basic “trap” of capitalism—the impossibility of turning salaries into capital—is less and less a problem. In an era where average qualifications are higher than they have ever been before, the substitution of monetary capital with direct knowledge puts it within reach for groups as small as a real community to produce for themselves.

Simultaneously to the reduction of the optimal scales of capital, smaller scales of production also become viable. Traditionally, short runs mean higher unit costs. Also, with a small volume of production, distribution becomes a nightmare, and negotiations with traditional channels becomes impossible. The product is limited to nearby markets.

And here’s where the Internet and virtual communities come into play. As conversational communities based on lifestyles and similar preferences form, what before were “statistical leftovers” in market studies, begin to become buying groups. The Internet is replacing scale with reach. The “long tail” begins to be talked about, and the idea emerges that “there are no big markets, but rather, unserved niches.” Soon, these communities of users participate in the design and conceptualization of products, finance them on crowdfunding platforms, and will be the main way word spreads about them. We’re still in the world of the direct economy which, as we saw, is fed by free software and networked collaboration. But in turn, as the direct economy colonizes new markets, carries with him the seeds of the step a P2P production.

From the point of view of a designer or a company, a direct- economy project is attractive, among other things, because the risks are reduced drastically. The different mechanisms of pre-release sales and crowdsourcing allow promoters to finance the costs of the first production with sales practically guaranteed.

From the user’s point of view, the experience of buying becomes discovery, a story that you share with those around you. Many people participate in the financing of a project for the pure pleasure of supporting the creation of something nice, or that interests them. Two decades ago, it would have been unbelievable for someone to decide to support someone else’s business launch without asking them for a share or hoping for a cut of the profits, but it’s true. It could be called pride in belonging, understanding collaboration in a broader sense, or a willingness to contribute to economic development. The issue is that the essence of financing a business project has been modified, in the most revolutionary way, and almost production itself: now, for hundreds of thousands of people, it has to do with the development of their identity and their community more than with the monetary cost effectiveness that a microinvestment offers them.

Conclusions

While in the old consumerist culture, identity was defined by consumption, which is why one bought, in the direct economy and P2P production, it’s the reverse: exercising one’s own identity is participating in production. Production returns, by a new path, to the center of what defines people. At the same time, the possibility of designing and producing directly is more accessible than ever, and that’s why communities begin to emerge that, after having been “niche” suppliers for others, “take the leap” for themselves into production, starting from the commons and adding new ideas, improvements, and product lines.

The P2P mode of production is already opening the door to a society of abundance. You can stop being a consumer. You can stop being passive and letting the things you buy define your identity. You can switch sides and produce, get involved a little or a lot in others’ production, and enjoy what’s been created together, from creating your own design to supporting someone else’s proposal with an advance purchase.

Don’t look in the store when you need something, from a cell phone to a razor or a computer for your nieces and nephews. Look for projects that are underway. None of them convince you? Propose your own, learn on the net what you need to do it, find your community in the search, become the owner of your life and of the material world around you. Become part of the freedom that allows the new time we live in. Enjoy the approaching abundance.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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The Direct Economy puts us in a world that goes far beyond collaborative consumption or SMEs empowered by technology: we’re talking about a world where production and community are joined and knowledge replaces capital.

Around the year 2010, John Robb, known for his efforts in the theoretical development of resilience, decided to develop a consultancy. He presented himself as an economic agent and discovered that he had different resources he wasn’t using. Incorporating them into his activity would contribute to diminishing his dependence on his main economic source—consulting. John Robb designed a set of activities, and concentrated on get them moving. He became a small agricultural producer and rented out different spaces in his house, besides selling advisory hours through tele-presence, writing books, and writing his blog. He started to refer to this phenomenon as the “direct economy,” a formula that allowed him distribute his income across different activities, all of them disintermediated.

While John was coming to this approach by seeking the reinvention of the North American family as a productive unit that is resistant to crises, in las Indias, at the same time, we were starting to lay the foundation for the direct economy as a result of the application of free knowledge and the reduction of the scale of production.

In our view, the direct economy brought together a whole series of productive and commercial activities of tiny scale that, thanks to the Internet, were gaining a large scope with very little need for financing. In fact, the combination of software and free knowledge, online advance sales and “crowdfunding,” was saving already a growing number of projects the search for shareholders and credit. On the other hand, the flourishing world of mobile apps was serving as a model for a whole new sector of micro-industrial SMEs. This was a sector centered above all, though not solely, on consumer electronics, that used traditional industry as a sort of gigantic 3D printer to manufacture ever-shorter runs of all kinds of products at low prices.

That is, the power of the direct economy does not reside in the possibility of getting extra income from underused consumer goods (house, car, tools…), which is the core of collaborative consumption, but rather in the possibilities offered by networks, disintermediation, definancialization and the “commodification” of the industrial work of entering the market with innovative products despite having a very small scale.

Why does the direct economy push society towards abundance?

The direct economy is the most radical expression of the reduction of the optimum scale of business. The development of technologies over the last decades of the twentieth century and of what we’ve seen of the twenty-first century has made it possible for the manufacture of sophisticated objects, from cellphones to electric cars, to be accessible for really small groups of people. The changes this holds in store are as radical as they are surprising.

In the first place, while it seems obvious, for the creators of an industrial project to be able to finance their production without the need to give up ownership is a true historical novelty. Ultimately, the economic system that we have known and lived with our entire lives was called capitalist because those who provided the capital were considered the legitimate owners of a company.

Secondly, this is possible thanks not only to advance sales or private donations that arrive via the Internet. It is also due to the fact that the large majority of these companies intensively use free software, which is to say, they benefit from existing capital, which they access freely and for free. What replaces monetary capital is less the value of the creative and technical contribution of the entrepreneurs, and more the prior knowledge accumulated communally and freely.

To put it another way, in the core of the direct economy, we already see the transformation of capital into free knowledge, the direct application of knowledge to production with no need for the formerly necessary mediator of social capital and credit.

This is more than a happy historical coincidence. The direct economy is the change in the modes of productive organization that take place among when the optimum scale of production approaches the community dimension. If we look at the structure of businesses in the direct economy, we’ll find they’re mostly made up of groups of 6 to 10 people. They transfer the knowledge that they possess, and design and offer products in the market. The community of concrete knowledge and the community of production begin to merge, while accumulated knowledge takes a directly useful, free and accessible form: the commons.

What are big companies doing?

Before getting into the social and philosophical consequences of all this, which are very important from the point of view of abundance, it’s interesting to pause for a moment to observe how big, multinational businesses have joined this movement as a way of relieving the growing inefficiencies of their own over-scaling.

As for products, it’s more and more common to hear announcements of pre-sale campaigns or even of production on demand: these minimize up-front investment at the same time that they make it possible to try out a new product in the market. Today, companies like Sony routinely measure the success of new lines of business with secondary brands on “crowdfunding” platforms, looking to minimize even the reputational risk of a possible failure. The use of crowdfunding as a way to capitalize a project has become natural.

Another growing trend in the incorporation of the direct economy by the giants of scale is to carry out direct public offerings (“DPOs”). This is a formula that allows a company create and administrate shares directly, without resorting to an intermediary. Businesses like Ben&Jerry’s used it as the way to finance their expansion in the US and into Europe. The company has the possibility to choose who the offer is directed to—so, for example, it could be exclusive to their workers and family, or citizens of the city where it’s based. At the level of local development, the use of direct public offerings by businesses opens up the possibility of locally organizing funding systems that local businesses join and in which citizens-investors own shares of the business. That way, not only would funds be created to promote development, social and democratic control of the businesses would also increase.

What about scales below the optimum?

Meanwhile, the supply of services available on the Internet is being taken advantage of by language teachers, personal trainers, therapists, nutritionists… access to services at a click has become more and more frequent. The Internet operates as disintermediating agent between client and provider. An increase of supply is produced, which incentivizes price differentiation between competitors, but it also encourages them to innovate in the design of services or in user experience.

Big businesses and professionals are two sides of the same coin. Both benefit from the reduction of the optimum scale of production as it approaches a community dimension. But this is not, by far, the most relevant thing.

Where the Direct Economy is leading us

We’re talking about small groups in which the difference between knowledge, applied knowledge, and practice starts to break down. In these groups, making the leap to production doesn’t require capital like something external and superior, which is capable of reorganizing the whole process in its image and likeness. In such groups, the division of labor and hierarchy fade in a way they never would in commercial businesses. The direct economy is the natural place for “multispecialization.”

The convergence point of the trends in the direct economy is the “productive community”: a group of people whose knowledge is converted directly into production, and whose process of generation of knowledge is difficult to distinguish from the productive process.

But beyond this, there’s still more. Theres a space that’s still closer to abundance, which is fed by this new communal world: P2P production. We’ll talk about that in the next post.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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We proudly present you today The Book of Community which you can buy now in Amazon. It was written by the whole team of las Indias and translated by Steve Herrick.

From the introduction

We know that most people who propose to “create” a community don’t want to “live in community.” They are looking for guides to design a way of life for themselves and their circle based on sharing more than what they share so far, even if they feel like it’s excessively risky to have “too much” in common. We believe that this book can serve them to do better without having to reestablish the borders that have been set. It’s not that the different dimensions are independent from each other — not at all — but what we learned in each one of them will be interesting even for those who only want to go deeper into one.

This book, rather than a typical “manual,” should be read as an “advice book.” Its focus is practical, because it was practice that guided our evolution. Like Borges, who “wrote” Quijote in the middle of twentieth century, discovering that “what was coming out of him” was identical to what Cervantes had written, though he had not read him before, we realized little by little that that that we’d learned by trial and error, what defined the lifestyle that we were discovering, followed the steps of a long tradition that began in the garden of Epicurus and which we recognized in our era in the Icarians and the Israeli kibbutz. Still later, we met other communities in the US, Germany and Austria that, with years, sometimes decades, of history, and dozens, if not hundreds of members, that had arrived at very similar lessons and models to ours. They are productive and egalitarian communities that give special importance to conversation, learning, and debate, but also to production in common for the material needs of all.

Because we didn’t start from any concrete model, and because we didn’t have “blueprints” from which to build, we have organically incorporated tools and techniques that go far beyond the scarce current community bibliography. This bibliography is, almost entirely, of North American origin and suffers from the need to “invent” what was invented in South America and Europe long ago: the forms and practices of the housing cooperative. What’s shocking is that by dressing it with new clothes (“ecovillage,” “intentional community”), it can find a market in places like France, Spain, Argentina or Uruguay, where there’s a very long tradition of this kind of cooperativism. In contrast, there is little, by which I mean almost nothing, written half-decently about the topics that we usually share, when we “communards” from different places in the world meet each other: how to create an environment helps everyone to overcome their fears and laziness, how to enter the market, how to integrate new members, how to avoid community self-absorption, etc.

These will be our central topics on the following pages.

We think that communities that share everything have a treasure of valuable experiences for anyone who proposes to strengthen their real community and the people they value and feel close with, by sharing some dimension of life in common, whether it’s the economic dimension, the intellectual, or everyday coexistence. Unfortunately, these experiences are mostly part of the “oral culture” of each community network. They are shared but rarely written down. This book is one of the first attempts to do so in Spanish [originally]. It does not answer to any ideological label in particular, but attempts to collect learning from many communities that do not hide from such labels. It attempts to collect a “communitarian consensus,” but also make its contribution, except that this contribution has more to do with common sense in caring for the people and things around us than with any political or social theory. It is intended for those that are considering joining a community or who want to experience community practices with their friends.

If we’ve done it well, it will save you time and learning that sometimes can be painful. If we made assumptions or left out important things that are not obvious, we hope you’ll write us so we can improve new editions.

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Between the 9th and 16th of September, we’re going to revolutionize the Sharing Economy to return it to neighborhoods and citizens

The discussion about collaborative consumption is reaching pretty clear positions on the role of business. As Neal Gorenflo said this week:

As for Uber, Airbnb, and the other giants of for-profit sharing, “they do a service in a way, which is to open up a new frontier,” says Gorenflo.” They’re taking the risks, so maybe they are entitled to the rewards.” He adds, however, that citizens would be foolish to not take advantage of this new frontier and create cooperative versions of Airbnb and their ilk in order to truly share the wealth.

The issue, as we’ve known for more than a decade, is that every recentralization, even if done on a citizen platform, has a high social cost: the devaluation of the conversation and the emergence of control. All it takes is experiencing distributed architectures to enter a completely different world. That’s why, if we want create a strategy of civic reappropriation of the “sharing economy,” we have to look to what is spearheading distributed architectures today: GNU social, the Free Software Foundation project that is having the most social impact and growing fastest in users and instances.

Activists, social entrepreneurs and hackers

Last October, An?ovoligo held a meeting in Gijón of experts in the Sharing Economy from across the world. Among them was Neal Gorenflo representing Shareable.

The main concrete commitment that came out of that was locate Shareable’s first European activities in Asturias, Shareable Lab, an open laboratory with a clear objective: design and promote thefirst free and distributed reappropriations of the Sharing Economy.

But what to use as a base? The opening of la Matriz and the conversation that this opened, gave the answer: create the first global “camp” to drive the development of GNU social, the GNU social Camp.

The package of GNU social Camp and Shareable Lab could well become the starting point for a true alternative the corporate sharing economy and even the corporate models of the “smart city”.

Reserve the days between the 9th and 16th of September. You have an important appointment, so important it may change the world… of sharing.

Translation by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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A few days ago Shareable published a post about a new documentary that seeks to promote cooperativism and show how local economies based on cooperatives contribute to creating more resilient surroundings. It’s noteworthy in the first minutes of the documentary that the main idea, the drive shaft that connects pieces of the story, is none other than ownership.

A cooperative explained in the very simplest terms is an organization that, in an egalitarian way, practices the formula of one worker, one share, one vote. Our emphasis on this message, without a doubt, has to do with our fascination with discovering a form of organization that, traditionally in the English-speaking world, has been used for consumption. Transferred to production, cooperativism in the US is coming together as a real option to recover the economy of the great industrial cores devastated by the crisis. And also the world of professional services, of commerce, or healthcare.

We discovered it with Evergreen a few years ago. Cooperative pride has a lot to do with making business ownership accessible to many who never dreamed of being able to move on from being employees, or of the possibility of modifying and transforming the productive system. It’s exciting!

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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Several weeks ago, Obama became the first president to write a line of code. It wasn’t his first nod to the leaders of the coming change. His first contact with the direct economy was through beer. A self-declared fan of this drink, the president bought a beer-making kit, and assigned his cook and part of his domestic team to begin to experiment with home recipes. After several attempts, the White House proudly announced the creation of two beers and made their recipes public.

Homebrews and start-up microbreweries have been taking hold in the market, and also expanding as an industrial business model of a new kind: small scale, linked to the surroundings, with value added in design and brand-name positioning.

More than a million people produce beer at home in the US. By 2020, artisanal beer will reach 20% of the US market. The microbrew revolution has already crossed the line from hobby to a new sector that, in 2013, created a hundred thousand jobs. This fact, this industry is beginning to make it viable to launch services for microbreweries and artisan producers.

From video games to beer

In 2012, the founders of Bioware, one of the largest videogame companies,announced their departure from the company. Both said they had lost their passion and enthusiasm. They made it clear that they would maintain a link with the business but would dedicate themselves completely to the launch of new projects. One of them, Ray Muzyka, devoted himself to support for social businesses in education and of health.

The other, Greg Zeschuk, who was fascinated by artisanal beer and the microbrewery movement, created “The Beer Diaries.” His objective: create value for the brewers and their products with a model of direct economy services.

Sense and sensibility

The Beer Diaries is an online television channel dedicated to artisanal beer, which is continuously searching for new beers, and with each new episode, they expand their map of manufacturers, kinds, and favorite brands. The brewers gain publicity, and the show’s producers discover new flavors. They also publish guides and reviews, promote consumption, and put together live events. If you like their show, you can pay to enjoy it live. They are a communications agency of a new kind, but also an audio-visual producer and product marketing business.

The user trusts their knowledge and selections. It is a buying guide in a market where new sellers continue to join and in which the product identity itself (small batches for local consumption) makes it difficult for the new brands make themselves known. The producers have a themed channel of communication, whose audience is their future customers.

Criteria, not ranking

In their business model, the accent is on their knowledge of the product and their ability to bring it to the consumer via the Internet. Their niche, for now, is beer, but what makes their viewers loyal is the criterion of selection.

That’s where the strength of their business and their unique contribution reside. Criteria based on ranking, like like Robert Parker’s wine rating system, serves to promote homogeneity at the expense of culture, and increasing demand at the expense of complexity. In other words, Parker-style ranking depends on the irresponsibility of the consumer and promotes an industry of impossible scale and impoverishing standards.

In contrast, to publicize, map, share knowledge, organize parties, and to value the diversity and culture of the product encourages the industry without promoting its concentration or devaluing the meaning that is created at small scales.
The model is staked on reinforcing the ability of the brewers to tell their story and on valuing consumers’ responsibility.

And it’s profitable. “The Beer Diaries” is not only a business model, but an ethical model. A way of being and working that promotes the values of an nearby industry. That’s why it’s an excellent example of what services mean in a world of the direct economy.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

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The next revolution will come from space. The P2P aerospace revolution will incorporate hundreds of thousands of citizens into space exploration and will go far beyond what any state has been able to do so far. The first human settlers of new planets will be makers.

3D printers have reached space. The first, installed in the International Space Station, just printed its first object. The astronaut excitedly said, “It’s a big milestone, not only for NASA and Made In Space, but for humanity as a whole.” Both Neal Armstrong and “Butch” Wilmore are leaders of this unique moment, from which there is no turning back. They blazed a trail, which was as uncertain as all trails are that lead to better futures.

Forty-five years ago, the symbol of the conquest of the space was the first footprints on the moon. They marked the beginning of exploration. The faceplate that recently came out of the 3D printer has a very different purpose, that of the construction of a new world. Following this first achievement, little by little, space stations will stop being sites where everything arrives in packet-mail from the Earth, in those little compartments where all kinds of trash accumulates until they are abandoned, like we saw in Gravity.

How does a 3D printer get into space?

Jason Dunn grew up on the Gulf of Mexico, convinced that when he was big, he would work at NASA or for one of its big contractors dedicated to space exploration. But investment in the space program was shrinking little by little. The aerospace industry underwent restructuring, facilities were dismantled, hundreds of jobs were lost… being an employee of NASA didn’t seem to be the best route.

In 2006, when Dunn first heard about the new private aerospace industry, he accepted the challenge. In 2008, he created his first space business, EarthRise Space Incorporated, and participated in the Google Lunar XPrize. In 2010, he signed up at Singularity University, where he me tAaron Kemmer. Together, they decided to found Made In Space.

 

Made In Space was created with the objective of allowing humanity be an interplanetary species. The first step to achieve that objective is the possibility of building hardware in space.

A roadmap in 3 steps

It was an ambitious mission that began with a very simple goal: to reduce the cost of shipping of materials and supplies to space stations by starting industrial production in space. For this, he designed a roadmap with 3 steps: Learn how make a 3D printer work in a atmosphere of microgravity; Design a printer; Launch it.

And so was that Dunn came to NASA, not as a hopeful employee, but as a project member. After 30,000 hours of testing and 400 orbits, the Zero Gravity printer was ready to go into space. This past September, it was launched to the International Space Station, to be installed on its base after a long trip. After some minor adjustments, a few days ago, it finished printing the first object, a faceplate that proudly bears the logo of Made In Space… and that of NASA.

When someone asks Dunn what his are plans for the next ten years, you knows the answer will be impressive. He assures us that the next Industrial Revolution will be in space.

Made in Space is the beginning of a change in the surroundings of programming and design, a dizzying development of free repositories to print all kinds of objects (including nano-satellites) that allow us to go further in exploration and in semi-permanent settlements. In the near future, sending and following a satellite from a mobile app will be as common as flying a drone is today. For Dunn and Kemmer, the P2P aerospace revolution will bring hundreds of thousands of citizens into the exploration of space and will go far beyond what any State has been able to do so far.

It might give us vertigo or seem incredible, but P2P production could finally open the doors of the lunar colonies of Philip K. Dick or Heinlein. The first human settlers will be makers who will accept the challenge and the joy of creating their own tools.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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