Sky Layer — the sky half of the civic mesh

Now · Aarambam

Spec is public. No hosted payload yet. No ground station yet. Reproducible by any academic group.

Becoming · Nilaiththanmai

Partner smallsat carries a small flash store; academic ground stations reconcile the archive spine once per era.

Layers of the spec

Layer 0 · Archive Spine — The corpus the orbital layer exists to protect — Tier-A citations, dossiers, MP Packs, continuity files — already serialised to deterministic JSON-LD and SHA-256 hash lists.
Layer 1 · Ground Segment (partner) — Academic ground stations in safe jurisdictions handle uplink/downlink of hash-list mirrors and store-and-forward archive bundles.
Layer 2 · Space Segment (hosted payload) — A hosted payload on a partner smallsat carries a small flash store and a deterministic store-and-forward queue. No sovereign orbital asset is owned.
Layer 3 · Sync Protocol — A delay-tolerant networking (DTN) protocol layered over standard CCSDS frames, optimised for the once-per-era integrity-sync of the archive spine.
Layer 4 · Intelligence (observational) — The on-ground intelligence layer — observational anomaly detection over the public hash-list and reception logs. Surfaces anomalies to human stewards. Never autonomous action.
Layer 5 · Governance — Multi-jurisdiction stewardship — no single body, no founder-owned credential — modelled on existing scientific consortia (CERN-style governance pattern).

d = 600 km · f = 2200 MHz · FSPL ≈ 154.9 dB · per-era budget ≈ 0.5 GiB · corpus ≈ 320 MiB · headroom ≈ ×1.6

Never dual-use. Never signalling. Never surveillance. Never navigation.
Never owned by TLTE. Hosted payloads and partner ground stations only.
Never autonomous decisioning. Intelligence layer is observational; humans act.
Never personal data. Never survivor testimony. Tier-A public-domain material only.
Never homeland operators on the public surface. Partner jurisdictions only.
Never proprietary protocols. Open spec end-to-end; reproducibility before secrecy.
Never founder-only credentials. Multi-jurisdiction governance or it does not exist.
Never proto-state framing. The layer is a resilience instrument, not territory.

DTN / Bundle Protocol v7 (RFC 9171) — Open standard for delay-tolerant networking; runs on partner academic ground links today.
CERN-style multi-jurisdiction governance — Trustee model — no single state, no single funder, sunset clauses, public audit.
AMSAT / SatNOGS open ground network — Open, citizen-run, partner-operable ground segment — proof that civic ground capacity is feasible without state infrastructure.
OreSat (Portland State Aerospace Society) — Open-source CubeSat ecosystem; pattern for a hosted-payload partnership rather than ownership.
Internet Archive + LOCKSS — Multi-mirror cryptographic preservation pattern — the orbital layer is the same idea routed through space when ground links are hostile.
ICRC Mission Statement on civic communication — Neutrality framing for cross-border civilian information flows during contested periods.