Shepardsport Pirate Radio started almost by accident. It was right as the Expulsions were really getting started. A bunch of us kids were sitting around in the big lounge in Miskatonic Sector, talking about the situation. Somebody wondered aloud how many people down there realized that this wasn’t a voluntary exodus, no matter what the Russian tsar might have intended when he issued his invitation.
So it went from just another bull session to a very earnest discussion of how we could get the word out about what was really happening. [laughs] When you get older, it’s easy to forget just how passionate teenagers can be about something that matters to them.
One of the guys, I think it was one of the Sheps but it could’ve been a Cooper or a Conrad, pipes up with the idea of an underground newspaper. Not surprising, since we’d been studying World War II in history class and Mrs. Townsend was having us read a book about the various resistance movements, including their various clandestine presses and newsletters. And there was a really popular teen-lit book right then about a school with a dysfunctional administration and how the kids circulated a secret newsletter about everything nobody could talk about.
Of course we knew we weren’t going to be printing up a physical paper. That was so twentieth century, and up here on the Moon, copy paper was a scarce resource anyway. But everybody’s got a computer up here, and HTML’s not that hard to learn, at least enough to put up a credible Website. Lou Corlin and a couple of the other guys with work responsibilities down in IT said they could do the fancy CSS to make it look like a professional newspaper’s website.
That was when Autumn Belfontaine overheard us talking and dropped in to ask us just how much traffic we really thought we could get for a straight-up digital newspaper. There were millions of blogs and billions of static websites, and most of them could count their monthly visitors in the hundreds. We needed to be able to offer our audience more, something they’d come for the enjoyment and then listen to the news while they were waiting for the next entertainment segment.
That was when she suggested a pirate radio station. She’d actually worked in radio, so she knew how a station would be run. She probably could’ve been our general manager if she’d wanted the job, but she was a reporter first, foremost and always, so she decided to be the news director and teach the rest of us how to be reporters and DJ’s.
The more we talked about our plans, the more I realized there was going to be a lot more nitty-gritty than just scheduling or even coming up with funding to pay royalties on our music. We’d need a place to set up a studio, and a lot of equipment, not to mention access to the bandwidth to transmit it back dirtside, since there was no way we could do an actual airwaves transmission like the old pirate radio stations on Earth.
No, this wasn’t a lark us kids could do with a half dozen laptops and some cheap mics. We were going to have to get the adults involved, which meant that Autumn was going to have to somehow get the senior leadership convinced that we were actually doing something serious and productive.
And then Luna Station blew up and the Kitty Hawk Massacre happened, and all of a sudden Captain Waite was wanting to talk to all of us about getting the truth out.
Brenda Redmond, “The Beginnings of Shepardsport Pirate Radio” from The Lunar Resistance: An Oral History. Kennedy University Press, Carpenter Point, Tycho Crater, 2059.