Space exploration begins at home

Our Story

At the 2008 International Astronautical Congress (IAC), Sanjoy Som showed a room full of scientists and engineers a banner of the Earth Flag as an example of one symbol that could represent all people and all nations, and the moments that followed led to the birth of Blue Marble Space.

The flag itself was created by John McConnell in 1973. It shows the Earth as seen in the famous Blue Marble picture from the Apollo 17 mission, placed on a blue background. It’s a symbol of a shared planetary identity that transcends national borders.

Sanjoy had begun considering the idea of having some shared identity for all people during an astrobiology summer school in Santander, Spain, in 2006. In 2007, at the Space Generation Congress in Hyderabad, India, he took up the question seriously: what symbol could actually represent humanity as a whole, with no nation, culture, or designer behind it?

In 2008, Sanjoy presented the idea at the International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow. During a plenary session at that same conference, he had the chance to show the flag to the entire auditorium, and to his great surprise, the whole room broke into applause. That moment convinced him the idea deserved a life far bigger than a conference talk.

One Earth Day in 2009, Blue Marble Space and its first project, One Flag in Space, were founded. By 2011, the research institute within our company came to life. Now we have a community of hundreds of researchers, communicators, and educators. We oversee a wide range of research and various projects that related to our mission and vision as a non-profit.