About Us
Anansi Spaceworks is Terry Hancock and Rosalyn Hunter.
We established this company to explore the possibilities for combining our love of space, space flight, space exploration, and space development with the insights and techniques of free culture and commons-based enterprise.
Since then, we've moved in a number of different directions, and now primarily work on educational and media work, with a focus on free-culture and free-software, but the foward-looking spirit of space development still motivates us.
About the Name
It was our original intent to create a space business, directly working on space development, but this would have required a lot more investment and connection than we had available. We set out to create a business with a very different and much more cooperative character, inspired more by the Free Software movement than by the history of space entrepreneurship as it has gone before.
We liked the idea of using a mythological reference (as is common in the space business), but decided to choose one from an African source (which is not at all common). And so we settled on one of the best-known figures of West African myth which has filtered into many tales throughout the Atlantian and Southern US culture -- that of Kwaku Anansi, the spider, who survives in a world of far stronger creatures through the use of his wits and his wisdom. And one of the best-known of the tales of Anansi is that of the Calabash of Wisdom, in which Anansi and his family learn that true wisdom can only be shared and that to contain wisdom, is to lose it.
It was also to be a pragmatic business with a hands-on, do-it-yourself, "maker" culture, and thus we think of it as a "space-works". We have been doing business as "Anansi Spaceworks" since we registered our business in California in 2001, though we have operated in Texas since 2003.