This January's Women's March was one of the biggest and most culturally significant protests in recent memory, but someone else has raised the bar for civil disobedience. In what might be a world first, the Autonomous Space Agency Network launched a protest of President Donald Trump in space.
ASAN won't exactly have an army of people marching or even a big presence, but they have a clear, concise message they want President Trump to read: "LOOK AT THAT, YOU SON OF A BITCH." The message is a gigantic, printed copy of a Tweet ASAN previously directed at the President, which they have now launched into outer-space territory. Attached to a weather balloon, the message ascended to about 90,000 feet, with the entire two-and-a-half hour journey accompanied by classical music in the video you see above.
There's a catch to this monumental feat, of course—90,000 feet isn't technically considered to be in space, and is more accurately framed as the "near-space sphere". The weather balloon would have had to rise to about 330,000 feet from the surface to be in "proper" space, though we're mostly cool with deeming anything that far away from the planet as space. Anyone with an interest in science in general can't be too happy with the Trump administration. Trump's policy proposals in the science sphere have included a proposal to slash NASA's Earth science program, which puts him squarely in the sights of a group like ASAN.
By the end of Trump's term, this will probably be up there with the wildest protests of the administration. So far, most of what we've seen has involved creative sign-making or force by numbers, except for a few rare exceptions. Shia LeBeouf's erratic livestream that ended with him getting arrested and eventually booted from his spot outside a New York City museum was notable, but taking your beef with Trump to space is on a whole different level.
Your move, Shia. Maybe you can film the next Transformers sequel on Mars and find time for a protest while you're there.
