Rohan Roberts—known on the playa as Astro—is a long-time member of the Black Rock Observatory crew, where he organises Space Talks during the day and spends nights helping Burners peer into deep time through telescopes aimed toward planets, nebulae, and the distant shimmer of galaxies.

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He has been to eleven Burns on three continents and served as lead designer and architect of the Temple at the 2017 Netherlands Burn.

His work often explores the overlap between cosmic perspective and human imagination—the same impulse that drives people to build impossible things in the desert and then let them burn.

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What continues to stay with him is not the spectacle, but the way learning, culture, and capability emerge in a decentralised environment. Without formal hierarchies, people learn by making, collaborating, teaching one another, and taking responsibility for what they bring into being. Outcomes are not prescribed in advance; they emerge through participation, shared norms, and individual agency. Experiencing this year after year has shaped how he thinks about learner agency, collaborative cultures, art, creativity, innovative problem-solving, and the conditions under which future-ready communities can thrive — not through control, but through trust, curiosity, and a willingness to learn together in uncertainty.