AmSat [1] is an organization of ham radio enthusiasts that are also very interested in space and satellites. They've launched a bunch of their own satellites into space that are available for anyone with a ham license to use to communicate. These satellites are usually named /^AO-\d+$/. That's what the AO-40 reference is to.
I don't know anything about the geosync or Mars sats that the GP is referencing. I'm assuming those were proposed AmSat projects that have never been launched.
Edited to add: A ham license is easy (and cheap) to get. I studied for a few hours and paid about $10 at a local testing facility to get my license (KI6BJU). The equipment is a bit more expensive, but I'm not sure how much it costs for a decent setup because I worked in a lab that already had the equipment.
Once you have a license and equipment, you can talk to other people over the AO-sats and download pictures from scientific satellites. I got my license when I worked in a satellite lab, and we used the equipment to download weather photos from NOAA satellites and helped gather data from other scientific satellites like NASA and various aerospace companies and universities. A lot of satellites have some sort of beacon with a public data format that you can decode.
Some google targets would revolve around amsat phase 4 p4 phase IV.
P4 is a little ambitious so it oscillates over the decades between active and shelved. About two cycles ago it led to phase 3 rev D P3D or whatever aka AO-40 which launched a bit more than a decade ago.
As far as kickstarters go, the AO-40 launch would be kinda ambitious, I guess just the launch alone was five million or so. The boost engine blew up, screwing up the orbit and destroying some uplinks/downlinks, then years later further related failures blew out the DC power bus, and that was it.
Now build like 3 of them and launch them and you're almost guaranteed that at least 2 would work... Just bad luck for AO-40.
There has sporadically been talk of a P5 which would be an interplanetary payload.
I've watched this stuff from the outside for a couple decades, being all volunteer its very cat-herding.
One thing I miss (dating myself pretty severely) is the Russian HF band satellites, requiring no fancy hardware on the ground and no ground computer support. I used to listen to RS-10 morse code telemetry on ten meters using basically normal ham radio shortwave gear, then there was a complicated little decode algorithm to convert raw data into actual data.
Another thing I miss is there are/used to be FM voice "easy sats" requiring pretty basic VHF/UHF FM gear. Very popular. Need more of those. I believe there's only one working ezsat in orbit right now and the hope is the FOX-1 project will deliver another working one later this year.
I also miss the high altitude / 12 hour pass Molinya orbit sats. Thus requiring fancy gear, but the highly elliptical orbits meant you could talk for hours instead of 10 minutes horizon to horizon.
So there's a lot of stuff to google for.
Ham radio is a fun, big hobby. Life's too short to actually do or try everything possible even in just the narrow confines of satellite operation, much less everything else.
I don't know anything about the geosync or Mars sats that the GP is referencing. I'm assuming those were proposed AmSat projects that have never been launched.
Edited to add: A ham license is easy (and cheap) to get. I studied for a few hours and paid about $10 at a local testing facility to get my license (KI6BJU). The equipment is a bit more expensive, but I'm not sure how much it costs for a decent setup because I worked in a lab that already had the equipment.
Once you have a license and equipment, you can talk to other people over the AO-sats and download pictures from scientific satellites. I got my license when I worked in a satellite lab, and we used the equipment to download weather photos from NOAA satellites and helped gather data from other scientific satellites like NASA and various aerospace companies and universities. A lot of satellites have some sort of beacon with a public data format that you can decode.
[1] http://ww2.amsat.org/