About Martin

Marti(a)n fettled the email, domain, hosting, theme, plugin and Google accounts, then composed code to represent the graphic novel in the form of a dynamic website. Like with the book, readers can follow the story and view illustrations, but also leave comments, upload files, write reviews, submit guest posts and contact the author.

The story of our journey to Mars is still unfolding – here you can join the discussion.

Martin migrated, scanned, disinfected, secured, and restored Pioneer’s site to escape an infestation of digital nasties in its web hosting server. The WordPress Pharma Hack redirects visitors from a site’s pages or search results to online pharmacies. For the site admin, it is jarring – because when detected by Googlebot the site may be blacklisted and if uncovered by a web host, the site can be suspended altogether.

3 minutes down the beach, Brighton SEO had grown from a handful of nerds in a pub to the largest digital marketing event in the world. Local freelancers were gentrified to make way for a new breed of corporate social media kiddies. This highlighted the lurking realization that marketers kinda suck and that what really matters to most successful animals is good communication – be it through art, words, and now, code.

Fortunately, this unforeseen change to daily workflow caused Martin to meet heroine Eddie Izzard next-door at the Odeon. And it didn’t stop him from working closely with dozens of business founders around the world. Filtering those who seemed to be clued-up and dropping the rest with added vigor. Why? to identify the skills natural leaders (often unknowingly) exploit and inadvertently teach the rest of us, for free.

It took a man of a certain age to realize that dads truly rock and that there’s always time to adapt and put new lessons learned into action. So he killed countless projects to focus on commercial space and his lifework IdeaMill. Now the goal was to own a home where he and his family could securely celebrate victories of the past and face the challenges of the future – despite biological entropy and well, the inevitable.

Going from 0 to 60 on the payroll and launching over 1000 customer payloads in its first 10 years, Nanoracks’ success lies in part in its entrepreneurial nature and pioneering leadership, hell-bent on inviting countless organizations and individuals to take part in the new commercial space revolution. Heck, Nanoracks even help NASA empty the trash on the way out, via the all-seeing serpent-like Bishop Airlock.

Bishop was designed to function today on the ISS, and tomorrow, detached and moved onto a Nanoracks Outpost. But will he first accept a donated AI-powered brain, open those wide eyes, speak his first words and win humanity’s affection? Will Bishop assemble his body from spent rocket stages and snake his way off to catch the eye of a delightful young Starlab, rendezvous, gain his solar array wings and use their new-found power to dance the night away, for evermore? Only time will tell.

Nanoracks is unlike other space firms. Most only sell their products and services to other businesses in the space industry. Their websites only really need to describe what they already do and provide contact details. Nanoracks has always faced the added challenges of capturing the imagination of the general public, researchers, high-street brands and governments – and simulating those new markets before doing any selling.

Martin created his third Nanoracks website using new branding, design layouts and wording provided by Abby Dickes. Optimizing conversion rates by topping up the sales pipeline with qualified leads from Google Search Ads, then better highlighting product benefits, publishing case studies and hardware documentation ensures more traffic is funneled towards the all-important, super-inclusive, contact form.

Why? What do YOU WANT to do in space?

Martin took a mockup of DreamUp’s website, created using SquareSpace’s website builder tool, and rebuilt it using the less-restrictive WordPress content management system. He also set up social media accounts and provided training and marketing advice to help the team bring space into the classroom and the classroom into space.

Enabling people to do the same experiment both in the lab and in the microgravity of space has the effect of taking (the fake) one of the four fundamental forces out of the equation. A rare opportunity! What others would have discovered here will never be known, due to their government’s lack of vision. So, hats off to the US for footing the space exploration bill and for empowering future scientists around the world.

Producing requirements, managing projects, and collaborating with talented artists, writers and coders was a nice change, but sometimes it’s better just to learn it and do it yourself. So after vowing to never again be employed, Martin optimized his own freelance marketing website and after all those years of experimentation, Google finally began to supply more leads and clients than he needed. Ka-ching? Not yet.

Martin collaborated with digital artist, longtime friend (and now published vegan foodie) Peet, who he had met years before at a government funded web workshop. Together they designed certificates and decals that flew with customer payloads on Cygnus CRS-1 to the ISS, before returning to Earth on Soyuz TMA-1OM. Around a decade later, Martin’s son LEO took the decals to his first space show-and-tell at school.

Martin helped the firm’s founder develop a new brand around the idea of hosting standardized customer payloads on the ISS. It worked. Nanoracks soon afterward signed a space act agreement with NASA allowing the firm to launch a self-owned ExPRESS rack and two test payloads on the final shuttle missions. The rest is history…

Martin was asked to resurrect the space corporation’s long-lost site from archives discovered deep inside the Wayback Machine, in order to ensure MirCorp’s list of pioneering achievements wasn’t lost to history. The pixel-to-pixel HTML website rebuild was hand-coded from scratch using original branding, images and wording.

The site was the first of over 100 Martin has since carved from the digital ether and was the one that, years later, inadvertently helped attract his first space industry client. You can still read Kepler’s harmonies of the world or watch videos about the first time a God’s universal laws were discovered by an unwashed son of a witch.

Still alive, but semi-retired and somewhat cleaned up, Kepler info spends its remaining time communicating science and inspiring others with new and old ideas via links to resources submitted by visitors. The site was granted online immortality for its continued commitment to helping others better understand life, the Universe and everything. From its conception, throughout its lifetime and to this day.

Yuzoz! A series of chance events led to a meeting on the beach with a ‘space guy’ who had dropped in from out of town to sell random numbers. The idea was to turn a free, unending supply of binary digits into money – by feeding live data streams of solar activity from NASA satellites through a branded Space Random Number Generator.

Martin was duly intrigued and conspired to help fix, launch and develop the Yuzoz website, create a family of web widgets and introduce them to a range of markets – from artists and designers eager to ‘Live Random’, to superstitious gamblers who believed their destined fortune would only be realized if they ‘ ‘Let The Stars Decide’.

Martin designed and built SellingPeace.com to accompany the book in order to help tell the true story of NASA’s lack of international cooperation, cross-cultural understandings, and acceptance of different perspectives. This insider’s exposé brings about a greater understanding of the complicated relationships between international partners set on exploring an infinite universe through finite means.

On discovering the trove of cheeky perks hidden within organizations that have more money than they need, Martin was invited to a bunch of shows including the BBC’s Any Questions with panelists ‘Thatcher assassin’ Lord Heseltine and the UK’s only Green Member of Parliament, criminal, mastermind and legend, Caroline Lucas.

The two spent a memorable day walking through the streets of Manhattan discussing Vonnegut, his work, his habits, and his fears. But how did this unlikely meeting come about? Well, they were both there at the same place at the same time. Why? Because the moment was structured that way – always was, always will be. So it goes.

So why do so many space businesses fail to communicate online with a similar level of precision and attention to detail they need to design, engineer, launch and operate space-faring hardware? After all, if using standard technology to produce a healthy web page is a problem, how can they be trusted with your payload, or your life?

By taking a few months out to study how the top space industry websites were made, Martin sought to understand more than anyone where their traffic comes from (Google), where they shine and where they fail. The survey uncovered indexation mistakes, usability issues, inconsistent formatting, and funny quirks which foot-soldiers, management and leaders, are unaware of. View the results with discretion.

Martin set up website hosting, installed the WordPress content management system and configured all essential security plugins ready for the organization’s website designer and copywriter. Before launch, Martin fixed a number of usability and layout issues and optimized the site’s pages for Google search, then provided ongoing monthly website health reports, visitor statistics and helpdesk support for the team.

After watching a video of the team discussing what they did and didn’t like about their existing site, Martin proposed a plan that would, with just 10 days of work, give them all they wanted. Altius’ website now provides the firm’s engineers with more of the tools they need to better communicate the benefits of their technology and market their products and services to more potential customers around the world.

Starlab is a continuously crewed, free-flying, multifunctional space station dedicated to conducting advanced research, fostering industrial activity, and ensuring continued U.S. presence and leadership in low-Earth orbit. Starlab will feature one third of the volume and all the payload capability of the International Space Station, making it the most significant fully commercial endeavor in space in history.

Martin joined Voyager’s team to help launch and develop the brand’s website soon after the company acquired Nanoracks and a number of smaller space firms. His first job was to audit the site and fix a number of layout issues, then to optimize all pages to achieve more visibility in Google, before moving on to provide ongoing web development, site maintenance, and monthly health, rankings, and traffic reporting.

IdeaMill’s mission is to bring people together through their ideas and provide insights to help us better understand the world and the people in it. But… what IS the world thinking? View IdeaMill Insights to discover which problems people are trying to solve with new ideas and explore links to potential solutions.

‘Evolution didn’t end with us growing opposable thumbs… we can evolve at will, and the way that we do it is that we evolve ideas…… Ideas are powerful because they allow us to see the world as it could be, rather than what it is… some new ideas are here needed…’ See the latest space, science, wise and funny ideas or join us.