The European Astro Pi Challenge: Mission Zero from the Raspberry Pi Foundation and European Space Agency (ESA) inspires young people to discover and develop a love of coding and digital creativity with a truly ‘out of this world’ experience.

It guides them how  to code a sensor check on board the ISS, and puts their creativity into action by designing a digital illustration and writing a personal message for the astronauts orbiting 408km above the Earth.

Photo Credits: Raspberry Pi

Children don’t need any previous experience of coding or specialised equipment, just a computer with an internet connection and their imagination. It is completely free to take part at astro-pi.org until 18 March 2022 and is suitable for children at the age of six and above. Philip Colligan, CEO, Raspberry Pi Foundation said:

“The Astro Pi Challenge inspires children to discover coding, explore digital creativity and take part in an “out of this world” learning opportunity by coding an experiment on the International Space Station. We are putting the power of computing into children’s hands with one of the coolest educational opportunities out there”.

Every participant who follows the guidance is guaranteed to have their experiment, message and image run on the ISS and will receive a certificate to mark when they have gone into orbit.

The new Raspberry Pi computers have already launched to replace older models – Ed and Izzy – that have been on the space station since 2015. Since then, 54,000 young people across Europe and Canada have taken part in the Astro Pi Challenge. Participants in this year’s challenge will also have the opportunity to give a name of the new computers.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK-based charity that works to put computing and digital making into the hands of young people around the world.

The team went out into space itself, wearing the famous thick astronaut suits as they made their way through zero gravity on the outside of the International Space Station.

The team was comprised of four astronauts, NASA’s Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, the European Space Agency’s Thomas Pesquet of France, and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide. They encountered some hurdles during their half-year stay in space, most notably when a Russian module botched its attachment to the ISS and pushed the space station out of its place.

The crew also met some inconveniences on their way back when the capsule’s bathroom malfunctioned, leaving them with no option but to wear adult diapers for the rest of their trip to home. McArthur was not thrilled about the situation but commented:

“Spaceflight is full of lots of little challenges. This is just one more that we’ll encounter and take care of in our mission, so we’re not too worried about it.”

SpaceX and NASA have been co-running missions on the ISS so that to ensure the station always has a team of astronauts getting the most from its facilities’ potential. NASA spent almost a decade lacking the necessary spacecraft to reach the ISS and have astronauts in space for long periods of time. Now with the help of SpaceX they are able to send teams out continually, with the next group preparing to head to the ISS immediately.

Jeff Bezos has led the charge. He founded his company, Blue Origin, in 2000, after a conversation with his friend, the science fiction author Neal Stephenson. And in July, 21 years later, the investment will pay off: Bezos will blast himself, his brother, and a third fee-paying guest 100km up in the company’s New Shepard rocket, brushing the edge of space until he comes back down to earth three minutes later.

But despite Bezos being the first tech billionaire to decide he should own a spaceflight company – and the first to taste the main perk of that ownership – Blue Origin is a distant second in the public eye to SpaceX, Elon Musk’s hobby turned business.

While Blue Origin was founded 21 years ago, the company operated largely under the radar until 2015, when it began testing the New Shepard. SpaceX, meanwhile, was big and noisy from day one. Within six years of its foundation in 2002, it had launched the first privately funded liquid-propellant rocket into orbit, Falcon One.

From there, the firsts kept coming: first private mission to the ISS, first vertical landing for an orbital rocket, and first company to send astronauts into orbit. Now, 19 years in, SpaceX is a mature business, pulling in $2bn a year of revenue. Like Blue Origin, it has focused investment on reusable rockets, which greatly reduce costs, and the two companies are now bitter competitors for the government contracts that represent an enormous chunk of spaceflight revenues.

Taking a very different approach is Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, founded in 2004. It hopes to create and capitalise on the space tourism industry, flying sightseers onboard the SpaceShipTwo space plane. It was the first private spaceflight effort to achieve widespread attention, thanks to Branson’s claims it would send its first tourists into space in 2009, but years of delays – and the death of a test pilot in 2014 – have led some to wonder if it will ever live up to those promises.

Of course, you don’t have to buy the spaceship to go into space, and Google’s Sergey Brin skipped the middleman, investing $4.5m in Space Adventures in 2008. The company is now planning to bring tourists up to the ISS, in partnership with SpaceX, and Brin’s investment – which also served as a deposit for a seat on the mission – is looking like quite good value: tickets for the SpaceX trips are likely to be about 10 times that.

However, all the billionaires were beaten to the punch by Mark Shuttleworth, the Anglo-South African entrepreneur behind the Ubuntu operating system. Shuttleworth, with a still-respectable net worth of £500m, simply bought a ticket on a Soyuz rocket to the ISS in 2002, spending 10 days in orbit as the second ever space tourist.