The problem is, how do you intend to introduce collaboration in this? It may be worth the shot, but it'd expect there's a big chance you won't be able to achieve that -- the "control space" of valid commands is likely very large and unstructured. You can't risk brute forcing it and seeing what happens because of the low rate and risk of failure from a bad command. There's also the responsibility of issuing a bad command. For such a scientific reverse-engineering you also need proper tools to observer the aircraft behavior which I imagine can be quite difficult -- what if a command sets the rotation rate of the aircraft to +1 arcsec/hr and that causes an antenna misalignment?
Unless, of course, you get full specification from relevant agencies and check with them before issuing any command. But that implies they're willing to apply resources on this project, which is another though barrier.
Anyway, sounds like quite an adventure. My sincere good luck.
Good points ... I don't intend to try this devoid of all NASA input (I've already reached out to a contact I have at SWIFT). I'm assuming two things right now:
1. That the documentation for the commands exists and that it's available to the project.
2. That NASA (or someone with sufficient knowledge) helps avoid issuing dangerous commands (e.g. running the spacecraft into the ISS).
Otherwise, it's probably better to do nothing. As I noted above, I view this more as crowd-sourcing the expensive "reengineering".
Unless, of course, you get full specification from relevant agencies and check with them before issuing any command. But that implies they're willing to apply resources on this project, which is another though barrier.
Anyway, sounds like quite an adventure. My sincere good luck.