Space Selfie

To encourage everyone to send their face to space, our team built a website that allowed users to upload or take a selfie and send it to space with just the click of a button. We teamed up with FlightLine, an independent space agency, to put the first phone in space that the general public could directly communicate with. We sent a human weather balloon to the upper stratosphere—about 60,000 feet above the Earth’s surface—with a custom-built rig containing the Galaxy S10 5G. On the frontend, our team used a suite of complex technology to maintain complete control and flexibility of the project, including the React.js user interface library, Redux to manage the application’s complex internal state, and Eslint and Prettier to ensure code quality and consistency across the entire frontend code base. On the backend, we used Python, built a custom CMS to manage all content and data using Django, handled communication between Mission Control and Ground Control via a RESTful interface documented using Redoc, and Google Cloud Vision AI to monitor and moderate content. Finally, we hosted all of this on the industry-leading Google Cloud Platform to ensure the reliability of delivery to our end users, lightning-fast distribution, and state of the art encryption and a very high level of security.