Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) has today (April 1st) launched a campaign in space on their new website serversinspace.com
Under embargo for 00.01, Wednesday 1st April 2026
On the day of the Artemiss II mission to the moon, Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) [1] has launched their first campaign in space, following the recent success of a motion in favour of a temporary moratorium on hyperscale data centres in Edinburgh [2].
The decision to take the fight to Space follows Elon Musk’s merger of SpaceX and xAI, and his intention to put a million datacentres into orbit [3]. The new campaign, hosted at serversinspace.com, also marks the organisation’s centenary, tying together APRS’s earliest campaigns in the 1920s and 30s against litter with their most recent fight to block the hyperscale data centres which threaten our countryside, our electricity bills, and our climate targets.
APRS launched their campaign against data centres in space on the organisation’s new website serversinspace.com, which was acquired by a supporter twenty years ago, when not even the most audacious tech entrepreneur had thought of putting a server in space.
Although it will currently be used to host the campaign, the organisation may decide to auction the domain name off to raise money for campaigning. The most expensive domain name was sold in 2025 which was AI.com at a price of 70million dollars, with the domain name cars.com valued at $872million during a 2014 transaction.
Dr Kat Jones, Director of APRS, said:
“When we heard that data centres were going into space we knew we had to act. A million data centres in orbit means yet more space litter, and we haven’t been campaigning on littering for almost a century to let that happen. Litter is a menace whether it’s in the Outer Hebrides or Outer Space.
“In our recent Centenary Review, conducted by a panel of experts, looked back on our 100 year history and concluded space is the obvious next step for APRS. Space is the ‘new countryside’ which billionaire technology giants think they can exploit for minerals and energy, and fill with junk. It is vital that we deploy our long experience, and tenacious campaigning to defeat this free-for-all.”
“The costs associated with expanding our campaigning to space are literally out of this world. We are told that just to launch a cluster of campaign placards and a team of litter picking volunteers into low earth orbit would cost several hundred million pounds, but we are confident that, with the help of the global community, we can do it. If we get desperate we might auction off serversinspace.com which we hope will lead to a billionaire tech bro bidding battle. And no, the irony is not lost on us.”
Dr Deborah Long, Chief Executive at Scottish Environment Link, who chaired the Centenary Review Commission said:
“APRS’s track record working on Green Belts and planning policy on earth provides foundational experience in establishing a proper framework of protection for orbits around planets and moons. There is clear potential for National Parks, and National Scenic Areas in space, and their litter campaigning and data centre campaign has direct relevance beyond the earth’s atmosphere, given the race to fire data centres into space. From the Green Belts to the Asteroid Belt, APRS’s experience puts them in pole position to be a pioneer in the field of environmental space campaigning.
APRS chair John Thomson said:
“APRS’s founders were an imaginative bunch, who rightly foresaw that safeguarding the quality of Scotland’s countryside would matter even more to future generations than to their own. But even they could hardly have foreseen that we would have to take the fight for our precious environment from the green belt to the final frontier”.
EDITOR’S NOTES
1. APRS has a hundred year history campaigning on countryside issues including litter, green belts, planning policy, and protected landscapes like National Scenic areas and National Parks. They founded the National Trust for Scotland in 1931. APRS have been campaigning against data centres because of the huge amount of energy they use and their impacts on communities and climate emissions.
If we don’t raise enough to send our team of litter pickers into space the money will go to support APRS campaigning on countryside in Scotland, and especially against hyperscale data centres. See: https://aprs.scot/data-centres-campaign/
2. See:
https://www.thenational.scot/news/25950572.edinburgh-council-approves-temporary-ban-ai-data-centre
3. See:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cyv5l24mrjmo
APRS is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation, Charity Number SC016139
www.aprs.scot