Analog astronaut

Some nights I write poetry. On other nights I put on a spacesuit simulator and pretend, very seriously and with a lot of protocol, that I am not on Earth.

Analog astronautics is how humanity rehearses for space without leaving the planet. Crews live and work in isolated habitats, deserts, and other Mars-like places, running the same experiments, timelines, and constraints a real mission would face: delayed communications, limited water, EVA procedures, cramped quarters, and the particular psychology of a small crew that cannot go outside. The data feeds real mission planning; the failures happen where failures are cheap.

The Austrian Space Forum (OeWF) selected me for AMADEE-20, a Mars analog mission in the Makhtesh Ramon crater in Israel's Negev desert, one of the most Mars-like landscapes on Earth: four weeks of isolation in a habitat, spacesuit EVAs, and experiments prepared by some eighty scientists from twelve countries, with a mission support center as the only line home. Ynet covered the mission. Before that I took part in D-MARS missions at the same crater, and I am a graduate of the International Space University in France, where I have since lectured on computer vision and satellite image analysis.

What a frontend architect does in a habitat is less strange than it sounds: missions run on procedures, interfaces, telemetry, and communication under constraint, which is to say, on exactly the things I have spent twenty years building for the web.

The two halves talk to each other more than you would expect. My favorite conference talk to give is still the one where a TensorFlow.js hand tracker steers a Three.js solar system. And the agentic web, in the end, is another exercise in building systems that operate well when no human is looking directly at them.