Hej folks! These past few months I’ve been working on a project to send a voice command to a spacecraft, and I’m happy to say that it finally worked! On 27 July 2026, a radio amateur in Oslo pointed their antenna to space, spoke into a microphone, and a satellite in orbit heard its instructions to play DOOM! It is the first time a satellite has been commanded by voice.
Onboard ESA’s OPS-SAT PRETTY satellite, the processing pipeline I developed captures the 1296 MHz uplink with a software-defined radio, narrows and demodulates it, transcribes the speech with an onboard speech-to-text AI model, matches the command despite transcription errors, and launches DOOM. A postcard with the gameplay frame, the transcription, and signal diagnostics is then downlinked.
This is not a pre-scripted trigger. It is a spoken command sent over amateur radio, detected and acted on autonomously in orbit.
The Oslo Group of the Norwegian Radio Relay League (LA4O) ran the July campaign: three of six captures triggered DOOM on the morning pass, then a live human voice reproduced it on the evening pass. They followed link tests from Legnica, Poland. Everyone involved is credited in the acknowledgements, and the experiment does not happen without them.