The Sky Is Full: a podcast, and why I need your help to make it
When I started researching Swarm, I didn't plan to make a podcast. A couple of years in, it started to feel like the perfect format to help tell the story as well.
Some of this material works better when you hear it. The actual beep of Sputnik. Engineers in California countering Russian jamming on the Ukrainian front line in real time. Hackers at DEF CON taking control of a live satellite in orbit from a conference room in Las Vegas. These aren't just footnotes in the book. They're scenes, and scenes belong in someone's ears.
Swarm comes out in January 2027 via Potomac Books. Alongside it, I've been building a podcast called The Sky Is Full.
It's eight episodes, each around 45 to 55 minutes, structured as a proper documentary series rather than a conversation. It starts in Ukraine in 2022, with what happened when Starlink became a wartime internet and private infrastructure entered the battlefield. It traces the military origins of satellite networks back to the Cold War, covers the collapse of the 1990s megaconstellation boom and how SpaceX rewrote the economics of orbit, and works forward through China's competing constellations, commercial reconnaissance as a service, the shadow conflict already underway in space, and a governance framework written in 1967 that hasn't kept pace with any of it.
It's designed as a finite series with an actual ending, not an open-ended feed, and the focus throughout is on structure and consequences rather than personalities or hype.
The full episode list and more details are at theskyisfull.com.
Why Kickstarter?
Back The Sky Is Full on Kickstarter
Partly because it's the right model for this kind of work. A series that's investigative, fairly dense, and doesn't fit neatly into an existing format is a harder sell through conventional routes. Crowdfunding means it gets made on its own terms, without waiting to see whether someone else thinks there's an audience for it.
Crowdfunding means the series gets made now, on its own terms. It also means being straight about what that actually costs: eight documentary-length episodes, professional audio production, research/interview trips and fact-checking, sound design, music licensing. The target is £25,000.
There's also a practical argument for doing it this way. A finished series with a proven audience is a more interesting thing to take back to a network than a pitch document. So this isn't necessarily the end of that conversation, just a different way of starting it.
Kickstarter is all-or-nothing. If the campaign reaches its goal, the series gets made. If it doesn't, nobody is charged and I find another path forward.
The campaign is live now. If this sounds like something worth making, I'd be glad of your support.
Thanks!
