[Slashdot] - MoonDAO Will Pick Two of the Next Blue Origin Astronauts With the Help of NFTs

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On June 4 a 10-minute Blue Origin flight (using a reusable rocket and capsule) carried six more people on a visit to suborbital space, reports Space.com — the fifth human spaceflight mission for the Jeff Bezos-founded company, and the second one this year. But GeekWire points out that civil production engineer Victor Correa Hespanha had his seat funded by the Crypto Space Agency — that is, funded entirely by the NFT community through mint proceeds — after he was the winner of its lottery for a ride to space. And they're not the only crypto community buying rides into space. CNET reports on MoonDAO: Over 8,000 people "minted" a "Ticket to Space" NFT on the Ethereum blockchain for free (plus a small transaction or "gas" fee), and...one of those NFT holders plus several alternates will be chosen at random for one of the seats to space. MoonDAO's members will also vote on a specific person from a list of predetermined nominees to gift the second ticket to. The two astronauts could fly as soon as the next Blue Origin launch in the coming weeks, but no target date has been announced.... "Our mission is to decentralize access to space research and exploration," co-founder Pablo Moncada-Larrotiz told me during an interview on stage at the DAODenver conference in February. In addition to sending people on a short trip to space, MoonDAO is also using funds from its treasury — it's raised millions worth of cryptocurrency through a crowdfunding platform called Juicebox — for community projects that include designing a small rocket and satellite. In other words, the ultimate vision is to build an organization something like SpaceX, but that's run as a community cooperative rather than in the traditional top-down corporate structure. "We definitely need more capital to get to the level of competing directly with Virgin Galactic or SpaceX," Moncada-Larrotiz said via Discord direct message on May 26. "It's for sure a long term project and I think it'll be a matter of building the right type of organization where builders are free to just focus on making awesome things in a collaborative environment." Unfortunately, MoonDAO's drawing Saturday experienced technical glitches, and after a two-hour livestream — no winner was chosen. They promised a winner would be chosen by Sunday.

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