Celestium

What would it mean if the wealth of space belonged to everyone?

Celestium is the first AI and blockchain artwork to operate from space, orbiting Earth aboard NASA’s section of the International Space Station since December 17, 2021. The work explores questions of ownership, access, and equality in a new era of commercial space exploration. As private companies race to mine asteroids and exploit extraterrestrial resources, Celestium asks whether the wealth of the cosmos should belong to the few who can reach it – or to all of humanity.

Participants from around the world engage with the artwork through an online platform, contributing to a shared image sent to space and earning Celestium currency in return. The currency can be exchanged for NFTs representing real asteroids orbiting our solar system, turning the artwork into a speculative experiment in the democratic distribution of space resources.

The core of the system is a custom blockchain built in Rust and designed to run in the constraints of the ISS environment. Transactions are created by participants in the browser, mined client-side using a proof-of-work mechanism, and submitted back to the network. Blocks assembled from off-chain transactions are then sent to the spacecraft for inclusion in the on-chain record. The blockchain library, the node software, and the API layer were all built from scratch for this project.

The frontend is a real-time collaborative canvas backed by a WebSocket API. When a participant places a pixel, they receive an unmined transaction from the server, mine it locally, and return it. A loop that earns them Celestium currency. The API maintains the full canvas state and broadcasts pixel updates to all connected clients as they happen. NFTs representing catalogued asteroids are available in a store built into the same interface, with asteroid data drawn from a fork of the Asterank dataset.

Realised in collaboration with NASA, CASIS, Lonestar, Canonical, and Redwire Corporation.

Thanks to: MindFuture Foundation, Danish Arts Foundation, Angiogenesis Foundation, Arch Mission Foundation, Space For Art Foundation and retired NASA astronaut Nicole Stott.