How can an ordinary programmer contribute to space exploration?

Question

I've always been fascinated by space and would like nothing more than to see humanity spread to the stars. How can I, as an ordinary citizen with programming skills, contribute to this without joining NASA or SpaceX? Are there open source projects I can contribute to or perhaps a lobby I can donate to?

tectonic · Accepted Answer

We often share projects on Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com). Some ideas:
- Work with https://satnogs.org/ to build an open source ground station network. - Check out https://www.opensourcesatellite.org/ - KubOS is an open source flight OS in Linux & Rust. - work on tracking bolides with AMS (https://www.amsmeteors.org)
What are your skills? There's tons of work to be done using Earth observation data and space data for interesting things.