The Conversion Interface

Twenty years working both sides of the military-civilian boundary taught me one thing: the most important question is never what a technology does — it's which direction it's moving.

In 2005, a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile — originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead to an American city — was loaded onto a Russian submarine and fired into the Barents Sea. Its payload was a solar sail built by volunteers and funded by Carl Sagan's Planetary Society.

The rocket was a Volna, a converted SS-18. The satellite was Cosmos 1. The launch failed. But the image has stayed with me ever since: the most lethal delivery system ever engineered by human beings, repurposed to carry something as fragile and idealistic as an eight-panel Mylar kite designed to sail on sunlight.

I presented the Cosmos 1 project at the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin. The audience understood immediately what made it remarkable — not the technology, but the vector reversal.

I. Two Directions

Most public discourse about military and civilian technology runs in one direction: the fear that civilian technology will be weaponized. That GPS will guide missiles. That drones will carry bombs. That AI will automate killing. This is a legitimate concern, and it deserves serious attention.

But there is another direction — one that gets far less analytical attention — and that is the one I have spent my career working inside: military capacity converted to civilian, scientific, or commercial use.

The Volna that carried Cosmos 1 was an SS-18 Satan — a first-strike weapon capable of destroying a city. On June 21, 2005, one of them carried a solar sail. — Mission log, The Planetary Society

This is not naïve pacifism. It is engineering pragmatism. Military programs generate infrastructure, hardware, and expertise at a scale and funding level that civilian science cannot match. The question is not whether that capacity exists — it always will — but whether it can be redirected toward something that serves humanity rather than threatens it.

II. From the Inside

I did not arrive at this position from the outside. I worked at the Institute of Geodesy and Navigation at Bundeswehr University Munich, under Professor Günter Hein, on Galileo — the European satellite navigation system. Galileo is presented as a civilian infrastructure project. It is also, structurally, a dual-use system with significant defense implications, built with EU funding that, as one colleague observed to me directly, operated in a space where institutional oversight was — let us say — flexible.

That experience taught me how the civilian framing functions: not always as a description of purpose, but sometimes as a legal and political category that unlocks funding and reduces scrutiny. The technology itself is neutral. The framing is not.

Later I founded SpaceBenefit, with three pillars: youth education through CanSat competitions, the commercialization of space station capacity, and scientific innovation. The CanSat program — the first German one, launched in 2014 — is the clearest expression of the conversion principle: we take the conceptual architecture of satellite technology and make it accessible to teenagers. We shrink the military-industrial object down to a soda can and hand it to a sixteen-year-old.

III. From the Outside

TheArthacker and techno-porn.com exist to document what happens when the conversion does not occur — or when it is faked.

The term "techno-porn" comes from Arthur C. Clarke: the glamorization of military technology, the aestheticization of weapons systems, the seductive photography of hardware that kills. Clarke understood that this glamorization serves a function: it makes the public complicit in the procurement, the budgets, the industrial logic that sustains permanent warfare.

My investigations into FCAS/NGF, MEADS/TLVS, and the revolving doors of European defense procurement are not anti-military writing. They are accounting. €3.4 billion spent on FCAS with no flying hardware. TLVS quietly cancelled after years of cost overruns. The same institutional figures rotating between program committees and corporate boards. This is not conversion — this is consumption. Military budgets absorbing civilian legitimacy while producing nothing transferable.

The SpaceX IPO analysis I published in June 2026 follows the same logic. Starlink is presented as civilian telecommunications infrastructure. Its actual revenue base, its Pentagon contracts, its role in active warfare in Ukraine — these are the real parameters. The IPO did not create a new reality. It simply removed the aesthetic cover from one that already existed.

IV. The Interface

What I am describing is a conversion interface — the boundary zone where military capacity either transforms into something civilian or fails to, where the framing either matches the reality or disguises it.

Working both sides of that interface — as a researcher inside a Bundeswehr university, as a Planetary Society collaborator, as a CanSat program founder, as an investigative journalist — gives you a specific kind of vision. You stop being impressed by capability and start asking about direction. You stop reading press releases and start reading procurement contracts. You learn to distinguish between systems that are genuinely converting and systems that are simply rebranding.

Cosmos 1 failed to reach orbit. But the attempt was real. Eight aluminium-coated Mylar sails, 5 micrometres thick, folded into a converted nuclear missile, aimed at the sun. That is the conversion interface at its most literal — and its most honest.

Most of the time, it is much less honest. That is why this work exists.