Czechia in orbit: Brno space days

From 5th to 6th March 2024, Brno Space Day, organized by the Brno Observatory and Planetarium, has transformed Brno into the Space tech capital of Central Europe.

The program began on Tuesday with open days in space tech companies located in Brno with Spacemanic being among them. We welcomed several groups of space enthusiasts, journalists, and excited young people who will, space willing, one day continue in our footsteps. All of them had the chance to tour our offices, see (and even touch) CubeSats like skCUBE, Veronika, and GRBAlpha, and get a sneak peek of what is yet to come. Our visitors also had the rare chance to meet and talk with engineers responsible for getting these little marvels into space and find out more about the joys and woes in the everyday life of nanosatellite designers.

In the afternoon the program continued with Space Coffee, an informal event with good coffee, networking, and presentations of several local space tech representatives.

Wednesday was dedicated to a very special event under the auspices of Spacemanic and VZLÚ. An interactive CubeSat workshop that answered burning questions like: What are Cubesats and what are they used for? Are there any Czech ones? How do we communicate with them? And since seeing is believing the workshop did not stop with the answers and went ahead to show real examples of communicating with a real satellite in orbit. The workshop was a great success and we were pleasantly surprised by the public interest and had to scramble some extra seats to accommodate as many people as possible.

A very special thanks go to Lucie Fojtová and Jiří Dušek for all the hard work they did to make this wonderful event a reality.