When it comes to anti-Trump protests, it turns out the sky isn’t actually the limit – at least not when we have woke, independent space networks happy to take the fight suborbital.

Yesterday, the Autonomous Space Agency Network (ASAN) launched what it’s calling the “first protest in space”, using nothing but Twitter, a weather balloon and the sheer, unbending will of science. The team at ASAN printed out a huge copy of a tweet from their own account – tagging the president’s @therealdonaldtrump handle – which read: “LOOK AT THAT, YOU SON OF A BITCH”. With the power of Trumpian capitalisation fully harnessed, they then attached the print-out to the aforementioned balloon and sat back as it rose to 90,000 feet. Space protest. Easy.

While Motherboard noted that the balloon would have needed to hit the Kármán line at 330,000 feet to be considered “space proper”, it did qualify as being in the “near-space sphere” – which, in the grand scheme, is definitely space enough for us. 

ASAN’s action probably comes as a response to Trump’s proposed retrenching of several different science-related agencies, as well as his vocal disregard for environmental standards – and planet Earth in general. Their tweet was a direct quote courtesy of Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who once mused: “From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.”

ASAN noted that the message was in solidarity with the upcoming ‘March for Science’, which takes place in Washington DC on April 22. In the meantime, watch the video of their space protest above.