Elon Musk’s SpaceX is sending ‘Space Art’ to the Moon next year. Musk’s collaboration partner Geometric Energy Corporation (GEC) is providing the utility through decentralized access to space displays for the project.
CEO of GEC Samuel Reid describes his mission as “transforming civilization” and that “There are newcomers who are disrupting space and making it accessible”.
The ‘Space Art’ will be connected with a CubeSat (U-class spacecraft), which will be launched upon a SpaceX rocket. A CubeSat is a type of miniaturized satellite used for space research, composed of multiple cubic modules.
The aim of the project is to connect art and cryptocurrencies together. Through this, SpaceX and GEC secure digital art onto a CubeSat. The art itself comes in the form of space plaques courtesy of Geometric Labs and Geometric Gamin Corporation, in the form of tokens within a blockchain.
The tokens available are referred to as “The Greeks”. These areERC-20 tokens, named after the Greek letters: Gamma, Kappa, Rho, Beta and Xi. Through this, GEC is providing the opportunity for anyone with a cryptocurrency wallet with an opportunity to leave a record of themselves in space.
The launch is set to happen in 2022, with one indication that the activity will occur on Musk’s birthday.
Outside of this, few details have been provided. The ‘Space Art’ could be sent to the Moon, and where ever in space the art ends up it will be as a commodity that is purchasable and funded by Dogecoin under the DOGE-1 mission. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, recently endorsed by Musk.
For those who purchase a larger holding of each of the tokens, this will present a wider array of pixels, colors and the duration of the display. This is something, much like non-fungible tokens (NFT), that will appeal to those with wealth to dispose of and who are seeking to obtain something original in the digital world.
The NFT concept does, nonetheless, ensure that artists are empowered to sell digital artworks as unique object, which is something that has not been easy to facilitate by traditional copyright means. The process allows digital art to be sold to a collector, while still remaining accessible to everyone else.
The organizers of the project see the activity as the “first social enterprise to leave Earth”. They also regard it as heralding a breakthrough in terms of decentralization, marking out a place (space?) where traditional finance cannot follow.
This is not Musk’s first foray into ‘space art’. In 2020, the tech guru commissioned a street artist to create near-indestructible gold paintings as décor for the first trip to the International Space station by SpaceX.
