Space Athletics Academypresents An Equal Space™ Challenge
Be Part ofSpace History
The 3-Second Signal Challenge
Free to enter$10,000 committed to the challenge
There is no universal visual language created specifically for human spaceflight.
Can you help design and test it?
In space there is no sound. Radios fail, helmets hide faces, and sometimes the only thing watching you is a camera. Design five hand signals for use up there — then find out whether someone who has never seen them can read them cold.
- Design five signals
- Test them on strangers
- Enter your system
I want to enter
Design your own set of five signals, test them on people who have never seen them, and enter.
- Alone or in a team of up to four
- Free, with no qualifying round to survive
- A phone camera and a pair of thick gloves
- $5,000 in awards — and you do not have to reach the final to win one
I want my class to take part
Students become First Readers. Seventy of the hundred points come from readers, so one class outweighs any judge on the panel.
- One class period, under an hour
- No student submits anything and nobody is filmed
- No accounts, no equipment, no marking
- $75 classroom materials stipend per completed session, while available
Nobody has run
the experiment
In space there is no sound — not the way there is here. Radios fail. Helmets hide faces. There is no fixed up and no fixed down, and sometimes the only thing watching you is a camera. So how do you say stop, or help me, or something is wrong with my suit?
Aviation answered that question a long time ago: marshalling signals every pilot on Earth recognizes. Divers answered it too — one hand, one meaning, worldwide. Spaceflight has not. Spaceflight has no universal visual signal language comparable to aviation marshalling or diving. Those fields use clear, shared hand signals; in space, visual procedures still vary by mission, agency and crew.
The first Equal Space Challenge went looking for the sports themselves — a global search for new sports in space, designed, developed and voted on by the public. This one asks what has to be true underneath them. Every rulebook needs a layer beneath it: a small set of signals for stopping, for asking for help, for warning that something has gone wrong with a person's life support. That layer does not exist yet.
So this is not an essay contest, and not a design competition judged on taste. It is a real test of whether a signal you invent can be understood by someone who has never seen it. Some of what entrants produce will fail — and knowing which signals get confused with which is exactly the evidence nobody currently has.
Somebody has to write the first version of this.
There is no good reason it should not be you.Quick answers
| What it costs | Nothing. Entry is free. |
| What you can win | $5,000 across eight awards — $1,500 for the Champion and $500 each for the best version of every single signal and two competency awards. You do not have to reach the final to win a signal award. See the awards. |
| Who can enter | Anyone aged 18 or over on the closing date — students, professionals, engineers, teachers, divers, community members. No membership required. |
| If you're under 18 | You take part as a First Reader — a supervised classroom activity, about one class period, that decides most of the competition. A competitive division for under-18s is planned for a future season. |
| Teams | Enter alone or in a team of up to four. Both are scored on exactly the same scale and neither is favoured. |
| What you send | One unlisted video, a reference card, 500 words, your Self-Test Log and an AI statement. That is the whole entry. There is a template or a checklist for each of them in the Entrant Pack, published when the season opens. |
| Equipment | A phone camera and a pair of thick gloves. |
| How long it takes | At your own pace. Roughly six to ten hours of real work. |
| Can I use AI? | Yes — for research, comparison and writing. Declare it. Every physical gesture is performed by you, on camera, in one unbroken take. |
| Who owns your design | You do. We take a licence to test it and publish the findings — never ownership. |
| If you need an adjustment | The neutral position works seated or standing. If any constraint is impracticable for you, ask before the published deadline and we publish what was allowed. |
How the season works
There is no qualifying round to survive. You have an academic term to research, design, test and improve. What you send in January should be your finished, tested work.
What you design
One coordinated set of five signals. The meanings are fixed; how they look is entirely yours. A signal may use one hand, two hands, arms or upper-body motion — as long as it meets every constraint.
There is no example set and nothing yet to copy. The meanings above are fixed; the gesture for each one is the part you invent.
The first three are the Core Safety Signals
They carry a fifth of the total score on their own, and they are gated separately: an entry whose readers keep mistaking one of them for RETURN or TIME STATUS cannot reach the final, whatever the rest of the score says. Design those three first, and make them impossible to confuse.
How a season actually goes
The constraints
- Three seconds or less per signal, held for one second at the end.
- Start and finish in the neutral position — seated or standing.
- No speech, sound, lip-reading, facial expression, colour, text, fine finger movement or props.
- Everything must still work in bulky gloves.
- All five must look clearly different from each other.
- Designed to stay readable when the whole image is rotated 90 degrees.
Research first
You are not the first person to need to communicate without sound. Look at aviation marshalling, diving, crane and rigging signals, military hand signals, maritime signalling, search-and-rescue and sport officiating. Name two systems you looked at and one thing you took or rejected from each. Three lines is enough — what matters is that you looked.
Test it yourself
Because there is no qualifying round, you run the experiment yourself. The Self-Test Log is a required part of your entry, marked complete or incomplete. Nobody grades your handwriting or your prose — but it is the single best predictor of how you will actually do.
- Find three people who have never seen your systemThey do not need to be strangers — family, classmates, teammates and neighbours all qualify, provided they have not seen your design. If you are a team, that means three people outside the team. More than three is better.
- Give them the card for sixty seconds, then take it awayThey do not get to look at it again.
- Perform ten signals in random orderEach of the five appearing twice.
- Write down every answer — especially the wrong onesThe mistakes are the useful part.
- Check it rotatedTurn your screen or phone 90 degrees and note which signals survive and which fall apart.
- Work out your confusion pairs, then change somethingWhich signal got mistaken for which, and how often. "I changed nothing" is legitimate if your data supports it — but a log with no mistakes in it usually means the test was too easy rather than the design perfect.
This is the whole challenge in miniature, and it costs nothing but an afternoon. Whatever your testers get wrong is what the official First Readers will get wrong in February. The difference is that right now, you can still fix it.
Record it
One video. A single unbroken take of about three minutes, four at the most, containing both conditions — ungloved first, then you put the gloves on and do it again. No cuts, no splicing, no speed changes, no filters, no captions and no added labels. A visible running timer stays in shot throughout.
Everything you need to record and submit, including the reference card template and the glove standard, is in the Entrant Pack, published when the season opens. Read those two before you buy anything or press record.
And no talking. Readers have to identify the signal from the movement alone, and playback is muted in every session — so anything you say is wasted breath.
The rule that matters
You may use AI to research, compare, analyse and help you write. You may not use it for anything physical. Every gesture in your entry is performed by you, on camera, in one take. That is the line, and it does not move.
Camera setup
- Landscape 16:9 — never portrait. Portrait cannot fit a full arm span.
- Camera level, still and square-on to you, framing head to waist plus your full arm span.
- Before recording, sweep both arms to full extension. If a hand leaves the frame, move back.
- Plain background. No school logos, no name badges, no whiteboards — readers must not be able to tell where you came from.
Nobody scores your framing — but a signal the camera cannot see is a signal your readers cannot identify.
The gloves
The glove standard is written as a specification rather than a list of approved products, so a glove that meets it is eligible anywhere in the world. Full-finger with all five digits enclosed to the tip, roughly a millimetre of material or more at the fingertip, non-transparent, and snug enough that it moves with your hand.
The functional test settles it. Wearing the glove, try to pick up a single sheet of paper lying flat on a surface. If that is easy, the glove is too thin. You perform this on camera as part of the dexterity check — a judge assesses what they can see, not a figure you claim.
Not eligible: surgical, examination or disposable nitrile gloves; liner or base-layer gloves; fingerless, half-finger or touchscreen-opening gloves; thin mechanic's or precision-grip gloves built to preserve dexterity; anything clear or translucent. Both hands wear the same type throughout, and gloves are never changed partway.
If you cannot get gloves where you live
Ask us. Where you are unsure whether a glove qualifies, or cannot source one meeting the standard in your location, submit an equivalency request before the published deadline. Approvals are given in advance and never retroactively, and each one carries a date you record on your entry form.
This is a rule, not a favour — the standard is written to be met anywhere, and where it cannot be, the answer is an approved equivalent rather than an entry you are unable to submit.
Where equivalency and adjustment requests go
Write to info@SpaceGamesFederation.com describing the glove you have or can get, or the constraint that is impracticable for you. Approvals are given in advance and never retroactively, and each one carries a date you record on your entry form.
Requests close three weeks before entries close, and we answer within five working days. That is three weeks before entries close, so an approval — or a refusal — still leaves you time to source what you need and record.
Asking has no effect on scoring, standing or advancement. Adjustments are published in the FAQ so every entrant knows what was permitted. If our reply is late, you are given an equivalent extension to record.
How you send it — unlisted on YouTube
Upload your video to YouTube and set its visibility to Unlisted — not Public, not Private. Submit the link with your entry. Unlisted means it will not appear in search, on a channel or in recommendations, and cannot be found without the exact link. Do not share that link publicly. Keep the video at that URL, unchanged, until the season's findings are published, and keep your original file.
How it is judged
Two groups of people look at your work, and they do completely different jobs.
| First Readers | People who have never seen your system — that is their entire qualification. They watch your signals cold and say what they think each one means. They never see your name, and none come from your own class or team. Once someone has seen your system, they can never read it again. |
| Judges | Experts who read your rationale, your research, your Self-Test Log and your video, and score them against a published rubric. They see everything. |
A session leader — usually a teacher — runs it the same way every time, in a room of people who have never seen your system.
Every signal appears once bare-handed and once in gloves, and readers are never told which is which. Nothing is cut from your video, and readers never receive a copy of it.
Where the points come from
points
Strangers decide
most of it
Seventy of the hundred qualifying points come from people who have never seen your system and do not know where it came from. Judges award the other thirty.
First Readers 70
- 40
Recognition accuracy — can people read your signals at all
- 20
Safety-signal reliability — the three critical ones
- 10
Recognition while gloved
Judges 30
- 10
Glove performance — whether the set survives reduced dexterity
- 10
Research and system logic
- 10
Rationale quality and AI disclosure
Seventy of the hundred qualifying points come from strangers, not experts. Every entrant receives their results — their recognition rate and exactly which signals were confused with which — whether or not they reach the final.
Can someone from my school read my entry?
A different class at your school can, yes. Someone in your own class or on your own team cannot. Readers are never told which school an entry came from — not even their own — and anyone who realises they have seen a system before stops, and their sheet is set aside. It means a school can both enter and help decide.
The final
Eight to ten finalists advance on score. The final is held online, in the sixth month of the season, and every finalist appears through the same feed, the same framing and the same protocol — whether they are in the room or a thousand miles away. Nobody gets points for being present.
In one room sits a panel of at least twelve adults who have never seen any of the finalist systems. They watch the live performances and write down what they think each signal meant, on paper, exactly as every reader did in February. Their answers are the score.
On the day you perform both conditions live, deliver your two-minute design defence — the first and only time you give it — face the standard 90-degree orientation test, and respond to one disruption condition handed to you in the room. That last one cannot be rehearsed, and is not meant to be. It is assessed on your reasoning, not on whether the signal still scores well.
This is Equal Space™ applied to the competition
In microgravity, the absence of gravity levels the playing field. Here the camera does the same work: a finalist in Hawaii and one ten minutes away are judged on exactly one thing — whether a stranger can read their signals.
An entry that scores badly is still useful. A signal set nobody can read tells us as much as one they can, and it goes in the report either way. There is no way to waste your effort here except by not entering.
Reaching the final does not by itself carry a cash award. The Champion is decided on the day, and the signal awards are decided from the whole field — see how each award is determined.
$5,000 in entrant awards
One Champion and seven achievement awards are named from the season’s measured results. The five signal awards are decided across the whole in-contention tier, so an entry does not have to reach the final to win one. The Space Language Pioneer Award is an honorary distinction.
The highest combined score out of 120 — the hundred qualifying points plus the twenty at the final — after passing the Safety Gate at both stages.
Five signal awards · $500 each
Highest recognition rate for that signal across the in-contention tier, from reader data, both conditions combined. One entry may win more than one.
An entry that triggers the Safety Gate cannot be Champion and cannot win the three Core Safety awards. It remains eligible for Best Return, Best Time, Best Under Constraint and Most Improved After Self-Test.
Two competency awards · $500 each
Every completed entry receives
- A certificate
- Its own recognition rate, and exactly which signals were confused with which — bare-handed and gloved
- Its entry name in the published findings
- An invitation to the online final — every entrant, not only finalists
The whole fund
The rest funds classroom stipends for session leaders, First Reader recognition and the cost of running the season. None of it depends on sponsorship — and any sponsorship that does come in is added to the fund rather than replacing what is already committed. If the totals change, they change here first.
Ties, joint awards and team awards are handled as set out in the Rules. Awards, stipends and recognition are governed by the published Rules and Regulations; where anything on this page differs, the Rules govern. Recipients are responsible for any taxes or reporting obligations that may apply.
First Readers
Every entry in the competition is decided by First Readers, and a First Reader must be someone who has never seen the signals before. That is the one qualification — and younger students have it in abundance.
What a class does: study one entrant's reference card together for sixty seconds, watch ten short passages played from one screen, and write down what each signal means on a paper sheet. Hand the sheets in. That is it — about one class period, and a smaller group can do it in half that.
Those answers become part of a real competition score and part of a published report. Every First Reader receives an official certificate, and participating classes may be named in the published findings with the school’s permission. Individual readers under 18 are never named.
First Readers are not paid. Their independent answers are the measurement at the centre of the challenge, and no recognition depends on what they write.
Everything you would need to run one, including a one-page sheet written to get the session approved by a head teacher, is in the Reader Pack, published when the season opens.
The lowest-effort way in
No design work, no recording, no equipment, and no consent paperwork beyond your school's normal policy — nobody is filmed, and no student submits anything. Answer sheets stay with you. One class period, and your class helps decide who wins.
For teachers
One class period.
Your class decides who wins.
Seventy of the hundred points come from First Readers — which makes a class of twenty-five worth more to this challenge than any judge.
| Route | What it costs you |
|---|---|
| As First Readers | One class period, covering about four entries — or a twenty-five-minute small-group slot covering two. No design work, no recording, no equipment, nobody filmed, nothing collected. Your class may be named in the published findings with your school’s permission, and every reader gets a certificate. |
| As entrants | Entry is open to adults this season, so you can enter yourself and so can any student aged 18 or over. A term-length design project with a graded artefact set — reference card, 500-word rationale, Self-Test Log, single-take recording, AI statement. Roughly six to ten hours of student work. |
The challenge is a complete engineering design cycle in miniature, and unusually for a student competition, the students run the measurement themselves. The strongest single alignment is NGSS Engineering Design — HS-ETS1-1, 1-2 and 1-3 — with genuine coverage of planning and carrying out investigations, analysing and interpreting data, and arguing from evidence.
Eligible teachers, volunteers and partner organisations may receive a $75 classroom materials stipend for each completed First Reader session. It is capped at two sessions per session leader and at forty completed sessions for the season, and availability is shown when a session is reserved. If further sponsorship is confirmed we raise that number and publish it here. Stipends open with the season.
A completed session is one class period or one small-group sitting in which at least three readers each complete a full answer sheet. A session covering several entries counts as one session, not several.
Payment is never connected to an entry’s score, to what readers write, or to any result — and reporting a problem never affects it. A session where something went wrong still counts, provided you tell us.
Coming soon
We are not open yet.
The challenge is built, the rules are written and the awards are funded. We are setting the season dates now, and registration opens when they are published. Join the list and you will hear before anyone else — no marketing, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Hear first
Sign-ups open with the season.
What happens to your design
You keep it. Entering grants a licence to test it and to publish anonymised findings — never ownership. Using your specific design in a Sports in Space® rulebook is a separate question you answer at registration, with credit by name, and declining costs you nothing. You can also opt in to having your design named in any submission we ever make to a standards body.
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