Author: (https://www.celestialcommons.org/team) Daniel Mackisack, Philip Linden, Molly MacEachen, Ruvimbo Samanga, Ayumi Tsuyuki, Sam Jardine Date: 2025-10-15

Abstract

Celestial Commons is a community-driven initiative focused on engaging new audiences and bringing new communities into the space sector through participatory policy making. The goal is to overcome public feelings of alienation from and apathy towards the benefits of space, by engaging citizens globally in the policy process, ensuring that everyone has a voice and a stake in the future of humanity beyond Earth.

Celestial Commons on the Space Acceleration Network Project website: The Citizens' Space Policy Initiative Project Plan: https://www.celestialcommons.org/our-plan Project trial results: Top 3 priorities of early respondents Daniel's Town Hall presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjQyMdVXKl0 Ideation post: https://discord.com/channels/914720248140279868/1395516209428041748 Previous Proposal: https://www.moondao.com/proposal/189

This proposal launches this project and provides foundational continuity for a full year, by funding a license to the software platform used to facilitate large scale collaborative policy creation, by collecting, synthesizing and analyzing responses.

With an active license, we can confidently demo the initiative to other partners with large reach and other partnership opportunities; launch the first major round of participation; generate our first policy platform; and begin our advocacy work, bringing more people and organisations into the sector.

MoonDAO will be among the first core sponsors that make this project a reality, and will benefit in terms of both exposure and growth, beyond its established reach.

Problem

“What about all the problems here on Earth?”

It’s a narrative we’ve all heard before. One that comes from a place of real and understandable concern. There is no shortage of challenges, and a great many of them hit close to home. But it’s also a false choice. One that we need to overcome, if we want to ensure sustainable development of the sector, while addressing those challenges and building a shared future.

Space has never been more accessible. Yet for so many, it can feel out of reach, alienating and even irrelevant. It still has the air of science fiction – real only for the exceptionally trained or exceedingly wealthy – and that perception is exacerbated by the current climate. Combined with political polarisation and pervasive cynicism, these perceptions fuel a negative feedback loop that further disengages the general public, threatening scientific research, peaceful exploration, economic development, sustainable growth and long-term public benefit.

In other words, public concerns about the future risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Although space-based systems, activity and infrastructure already impact our lives in innumerable ways, just telling people isn’t enough. “Space is for everyone” is only a platitude unless we make it so. The public needs a way to directly and authentically engage with building our future in space, free of preconceptions and prerequisites. The best way to do that is to embrace the obstacle as an opportunity – working backwards from aspirations for the future to priorities for the present; identifying points of consensus; building a new kind of connection with the sector; and replacing that negative loop with a positive one.

Solution

Drawing on participatory methodologies, we’re undertaking a collaborative goal-setting and policy creation process. It starts with two open questions:

• What do you want humanity’s future in space to look like?
• What should governments, businesses, and others be doing now to make that future a reality?

Using AI-driven civic tech and leveraging reach through global partnerships, we gather and synthesise large volumes of public responses (from text to video, online and in person), transforming them into both a shared vision, and a dynamic Citizens’ Policy Platform that becomes a foundational resource for civil society groups, political parties, and other organisations where agendas are still forming and who are seeking inclusive, foresighted policies in emerging frontiers.

In our early trials, participants across Europe and the United States found consensus on core issues and aspirations, from “Equity & Inclusion” to “International Cooperation” and “Environmental Protection”.

We are now targeting thousands of participants in dozens of countries and channelling their voices straight into the grassroots of policymaking, while offering those in both the public and private sectors authentic insights on shifting public sentiments, aspirations and priorities.

Our goal is simple – to make space not just something people care about, but something they feel part of. Because if recent history has taught us anything, it’s that sustainable progress depends on a public that is not only informed and inspired, but actively included.

At the heart of this project, is the requirement for a software platform that facilitates not only large-scale public participatory, deliberative and creative processes as well as traditional surveys, but provides us with the ability to synthesise inputs at scale; analyse the data; and transform the results into workable documents.

The project lead, Daniel, as a consultant and product developer/manager in the political innovation space, has conducted extensive research and had experience working with more than a dozen tools currently on the market and used by government at all levels to facilitate everything from citizens assemblies and policy labs through to participatory budgets and the design of physical community spaces.

The specific methodology of the project draws together best practice elements from across the spectrum of participatory and deliberative democracy initiatives and applies them within the unique framework of space policy and the space sector, with the specific objectives provided above. This creates certain niche requirements which have also been fleshed out further through engagement with independent advisory and support bodies in the citizen participation domain (such as People Powered via their menteeship program)

Our decision-making is further informed by independent comparative analysis. A list of tools and independent ratings, including relative pricing, can be found here - https://www.peoplepowered.org/platform-ratings

*Specific price points for many of these tools are not available to the public, can only be acquired through consultation, and may not be shared. However, annual subscriptions range from free (simplistic voting tools), to 5000 USD (basic participatory budgeting and concept voting tools), to more than 30,000 USD for those tools targeted at the state level for large-scale public engagement with GIS analysis and campaigning features.

Based on all of the above, we have chosen GoVocal under a Premium License as the software platform capable of executing our methodology. Our project budget solely reflects a 12-month license for the software with a feature set for our specific purpose, and factors for a 30% discount for purchase within a specific time window, as well as a small margin accounting for shifts in conversion rates.

In terms of price point, GoVocal sits in the middle of the pack. Most of the other tools on the market, however, regardless of price point, are unsuitable for the specific methodology of the project. That being, the AI-driven synthesis of large-scale survey responses and the AI-driven querying of the resulting database. GoVocal is one of the highest rated many years running (87/100 in 2025) and stands alone in its functionality, as it allows us to easily generate summaries as well policy proposals and other documents out of a large volume of complex responses with minimum overhead; view inline referencing to the specific source input of summary statements; query the database in real language; and generate custom documents by specifying demographic and other variables.

For example, we can ask “What are the top 3 policy priorities of those respondents living in Germany?” and the platform will provide us with an answer. We can then say “Please format this as a policy document” and it will do so. We can further ask the platform to “Contrast aspirations for humanity's future in space between those in the United States and Australia” and it will do so. Or, drawing on different data attained over time, we can ask “How have perspectives and priorities in the UK shifted over the last year” and will similarly get a real language response. In this way, the platform acts as a standalone LLM with a consensually provided dataset of human perspectives on space, in addition to a participatory policymaking tool.

The GoVocal team has also been very helpful with getting our prototype set up on a trial license. We successfully deployed the prototype survey and derived policy insights from the responses (with references) with their purpose-built AI tools. The survey form is robust and supports text, audio, or video responses and localisation to multiple languages. The AI tools not only summarise responses but also extract themes from aggregated responses, with links back to responses that are cited, even for languages other than English. We are confident that this tool allows us to effectively process many, many responses with the confidenc