About Martin

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’.

Jeff Manber’s warts-and-all memoir details the Russian-American relationship during the golden age of space exploration and charts the emergence of the Russian space program as a powerful ally to the international community from the perspective of an American who participated on the Russian side.

Martin designed and created 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.

Despite not being a customer of the pricey degrees the University sells, Martin sneaked in and was quickly whisked away from the School of Education up to the faculty office. Here he managed sites for a number of schools, improved their Google rankings, and took on the merciless role of Faculty Brand Enforcer! And loved it.

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.

Learned some C+ programming from Kashyap Addepally and designed the interface for software he had created that would allow customers to track the whereabouts and status of their space hardware. The project didn’t go into production before the developer got secret work for the MOD and his father had selected him the perfect bride. So they all went to the wedding and stayed on for a while in Hyderabad, India.

Imagine meeting poor capitalists for the firt time. Some with a bizarre gratitude for empirical British rule. Being perplexed by a democratic caste system that finds money for a space program before making a safety net for homeless orphan kids. The killer sun, competing gods, divine temples, traditional ceremonies, smoke and rituals, ‘Delhi belly’ and westernized karma all sharing a brain full of semi-digested C+ code as it made a dizzy descent over the city of London’s nightlife for the first time. Barf.

Usual story: set up digital accounts, created website and managed emails for a new space brand. Met the team in Houston after calling into New York City to make a pilgrimage to the home of Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse 5. Somewhere in there Martin bumped into a guy who knew the great science fiction writer himself – former TV show jazz pianist and far-out ragtime teacher Dr. Mark Birnbaum.

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.

We know potential customers, partners and investors start to lose confidence the moment they encounter design issues, broken links or spelling mistakes on your site. And because it talks to your audiences more than all of your staff combined, your site can’t help but highlight overlooked weaknesses. Losing trust you may never regain.

 

So why do so many space businesses fail to communicate online with a similar level of precision and attention to detail required to plan, 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 customer hardware?

By taking a few months out to study how the top space industry websites were made, where they shine and where they fail, Martin sought to understand more than anybody the Google indexation mistakes, usability issues, inconsistent formatting and funny quirks that foot-soldiers, management, and leaders alike seem happy to keep visible on their websites. View the results with discretion.

Nanoracks started as a payload provider to the ISS and built the first commercially independent space business. The company’s commitment to stimulating market demand across all orbiting platforms has allowed new space users, from students to researchers, space-hardened veterans from government space agencies and industry alike, to make wonderful breakthroughs in low-Earth orbit and beyond.

 

Going from 0 to 60 on the payroll and launching over 1300 customer payloads in little over a decade, Nanoracks’ success lies in part with its pioneering leadership and entrepreneurial nature, dedicated to inviting countless people and organizations to take part in the new commercial space revolution. Heck, it even helps NASA clean the bins 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 and change his mind, assemble his body from spent rocket stages, to snake his way off to catch the eye of a delightful Starlab, rendezvous with her gain, his solar panel wings and preside over his digital heaven in space? Only time will tell…

 

Unlike most space firms, which only sell to other businesses in the space industry. Their websites only need to describe what they do, rather than target multiple markets to generate sales leads. Nanoracks has always faced the added difficult challenges of capturing the imagination of the general public, describing what is possible, communicating its offering, making sales, and managing customer missions.

 

Martin created his third Nanoracks website using new branding, design layouts and wording provided by Abby Dickes. By feeding the sales pipeline with qualified leads from Google search ads, better highlighting the benefits of its products, and publishing case studies, hardware documentation to funnel visitors towards the all-important contact form. Why, what do you want to do in space?

Nothing good lasts forever, thank goodness. So after years of studying the science and art of making enough money from home to pay the rent, Martin became a digital vagrant once again – resorting to squatting any nearby coffee shops with heating and an internet connection, after being kicked out of his home office by 2 noisy kids.

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 on a free day out. This cemented the realization that marketing sucks and what really matters to most successful animals is good communication – be it through art, words, and now, code.

 

Fortunately, this unplanned and hopefully transient workflow caused Martin to meet Eddie Izzard next-door at the Odeon, and it didn’t stop him from working closely with dozens of business owners around the world. Filtering those that seemed to be clued-up and dropping the rest with added vigor – 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.

Voyager designs and develops commercial space stations and innovative systems to revolutionize how humanity explores space. The company’s space infrastructure supports customer utilization needs and its leading mission management team guides customer space journeys from start to finish. Voyager are currently working to turn Nanoracks’ proposed Starlab Station into the first ever orbiting Space Hotel.

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 brands. 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 site maintenance, support and monthly website health, rankings, and traffic reporting.

With over 27,000 pieces of trackable space junk orbiting Earth, and millions of smaller pieces not tracked, space debris is a grave concern for commercial, civilian, and national security space operators. Altius have launched over 300 DogTag grappling fixtures to help rendezvous and dock then relocate or de-orbit dead satellites since it was founded by Jon Goff to make a profit and make a difference.

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

StarLab Oasis seeks to address the challenges of food security and climate change using cutting-edge in-space research and technology including Nanoracks’ proposed Outposts. The Abu Dhabi-based organization is focused on discovering innovations that will help green the Earth’s driest regions most impacted by climate change and to illustrate how much more space exploration can do to help us here on Earth.

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.

IdeaMill is a live feed of the world’s ideas. Anyone can post ideas they like and add links on ideas posted by others. Links often point to pages on the web where the idea has already been tried and tested. So when the same link is added on more than one idea, IdeaMill can connect existing solutions to more of the problems they can solve.

 

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…’ Help Martin by adding new or old space, science, wise or funny ideas.

DreamUp provides schools and universities with low-cost access to space research platforms in suborbital and low-Earth orbit for educational space research. The public-benefit corporation has flown over 500 student science experiments to the ISS on SpaceX and Northrop Grumman rockets to ensure students of all ages and backgrounds around the world can become the next pioneers of space science.

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 in the lab and in space then compare the results, equates to taking one of the four fundamental forces out of the equation. What Martin and other British students would have done with similar opportunities will never be known due to their government’s lack of vision. So, hats of to the US for footing the space exploration bill and for inspiring future scientists aound the world.

Built sites for the marketing agency’s clients, including small UK TV stations and an early voucher code brand. This is when Martin worked out how to manipulate Google to a degree that one site he built and optimized attracted more traffic than all the others put together. Eureka! It was also about this time when he set up home with his first love, keyboardist Charley Hayter from their Little Trophy band. Hallelujah!

Producing requirements, managing projects, and collaborating with talented artists, writers and coders was fun. But Martin soon realized that sometimes it’s better just to learn it and do it yourself. So after vowing never again to be employed, Martin optimized his own marketing services site and after years of experimentation, Google finally began to supply more leads and clients than he needed. Ka-ching? Not yet.

‘Space for Everyone! Got the money? Get in line – Bypass NASA, low-Earth orbit open-source space is here’ announces Jeff Manber on TEDx. Now a dozen Nanorackians devote themselves to simulating commercial markets, predicting customer needs, and developing new product lines. Turns out, there was a market for internal and external payload hosting, and Satellite Deployment from the station. Good call.

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 founders 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…

MirCorp.Org documents the leasing of the Soviet Mir Space Station for 2 years by a group of maverick American space entrepreneurs and details the signing of the first citizen space explorer. Pressure from above forced the Mir to deorbit on March 23rd 2001, killing MirCorp – but its spirit lives on, as told in the movie Orphans of Apollo.

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

Love, lego, border collie, Zx81, space, design, guitars, then did electronic engineering in college before leaving the UK’s Lake District to travel, read and retire for a decade. Washed up on the beach, joined a band and started gigging, studied astronomy and web design at Brighton Metropole. Learned PHP, HTML, CSS, Photoshop and Illustrator to create JohannesKepler.Info.

The site was the first of over 100 Martin has since carved from the digital ether and was also the one which inadvertently helped him get his first contract with a space industry client. You can still hear the music of the spheres or watch videos about how the first of God’s universal laws were discovered by an unwashed son of a witch.

 

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