Autonomous Astronauts at MayDay Rooms

In 1995 the launch of balloons near to  Windsor castle marked the inauguration of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA), proclaiming itself the world’s first independent community-based space exploration programme.  

The 30th anniversary of this launch was marked with an event in April 2025 at London radical archive, the MayDay Rooms, to explore the legacy of the AAA and its relevance today.  Over a five year period, the AAA developed into an outernational network of groups that, as the invite to the  MayDay Rooms event put it: ‘organized raves in space, played three-sided football tournaments, built spaceship launchpads in the heart of the city, took part in intergalactic conferences and experienced zero-gravity training flights—all while mounting a radical critique of government, military, and corporate control of space travel’.

At the time and in the years since, people have struggled to pin down what the AAA actually was. A situationist-inspired prank? An (anti)art project? A serious attempt an an interstellar revolutionary movement? A gathering of technoheads?  Its strength is that it was all and none of these things, reflecting the diverse backgrounds and interests of those involved which included ultra-left politics, magick, electronic and industrial music, mail art and many other strands, woven together in various strange combinations.

From these different starting points the AAA was able to ‘move in several directions at once’, as Jason Skeet (Inner City AAA) highlighted in his talk, ‘What makes it possible to attempt the impossible?’. 

The AAA did not, as far as is known, launch any physical rocket ships into outer space, but it did generate an incredible field of space-themed activity.  And at least two AAA members did get to explore zero gravity, taking part in high altitude parabolic flights used for Russian cosmonaut training.  Ewen Chardronnet  (AAA Rosko), over from Paris, was one of these and as he told the MayDay Rooms event he has continued to be active in space-themed creative projects, including ‘Space without rockets’, which challenged the environmental impact of traditional space programmes.

The AAA predicted that space would soon become the banal preserve of wealthy space tourists, and today that is the avowed aim of some of the world’s richest people. Just before the MayDay Room event, pop star Katy Perry and others reached space in a short trip aboard Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket. In his contribution streamed direct from Italy, Riccardo Balli (AAA Bologna) proclaimed ‘Forget about Musk, Bezos & Branson, this was the AAA (and it will always be)!’

The AAA critiqued too the militarisation of space, which has expanded exponentially in recent years. A speaker from Space Watch UK described the ‘UK’s military space programme in 2025’, with the Government’s UK Space Agency working hand in glove with the military’s UK Space Command, including developing a network of UK spaceports at locations including Shetland.

The MayDay Rooms has now collected together an extensive archive of AAA material, and this was introduced by myself and John Eden (Raido AAA). Others astronauts present included Juleigh (Disconaut AAA), Fabian (East London AAA) , Rob (Parasol AAA) and Paul Meme/Grievous Angel (WiccAAA)

In the evening there was a party with space sounds and a showing of Aaron Trinder’s film ‘Free Party: a folk history’, covering the 1990s sound system scene. The overlap between the AAA and electronic/experimental/dance music scenes was extensive. Most of the London AAA people were involved with or at least hung out at Dead by Dawn, the  techno night at Brixton’s 121 anarchist centre, which was of course also a big part of the Praxis/Datacide story. Indeed several people around the AAA were helping to invent breakcore at the same time, but that’s another story…

The following day saw a three sided football match in Victoria Park. The game, conceived of by Danish situationist Asger Jorn, was utilized by the AAA for space training, orienting astronauts to sudden shifts of perspective and non-binary thinking.

But enough looking back, some of us are still looking at the stars. As the Wu Ming collective – who include sometime AAA collaborator Roberto Bui – put it recently: ‘When human beings feel cornered, constrained, oppressed, distressed, they turn their eyes to the sky, to the firmament. The act of looking at the starry sky is the prelude to any liberation, any revolution […] because looking at the sky broadens the perception of space and therefore of possibility, relieves the head from the ballasts of the present’ (‘UFOs and the longing for the unidentified’, 2023).

Neil Transpontine/Disconaut AAA

• Other articles by Neil Transpontine on datacide-magazine.com
• Neil’s South London blog
• Neil’s blog History is Made at Night

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