SAN FRANCISCO — Copernic Space is selling digital capacity and lunar assets for a 2024 moon mission.
It’s the latest step in the Los Angeles startup’s campaign to create a digital marketplace for selling and financing space assets.
Copernic Space lunar payload will be housed in a capsule from San Francisco startup LifeShip. LifeShip is collecting DNA from customers as part of its campaign to establish a lunar seed bank and data archive. The LifeShip capsule is scheduled to launch in 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. If all goes as planned, it will touch down in the northern lunar hemisphere’s Mare Crisium in Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander.
In the past Copernic Space sold payload space for customers including Lunar Outpost. Recently, Copernic Space opted to invest in its own lunar payload because “that way we can control the business process,” said Grant Blaisdell, Copernic Space co-founder and CEO. “I can break down the accessibility barriers and the economic barriers. By taking a big asset and fractionalizing it, I can enable a whole different commercial and even consumer segment to access the space market.”
Digital assets being sent in the Copernic Space lunar payload include music, code, fine art collections, company registrations and videos.
In addition, Axiom Space3, the Web3 technologies arm of the space infrastructure developer, is holding a contest to select the first meme to send to the moon as a tokenized asset. Another Copernic Space customer is Sophiaverse, a joint venture established in 2016 by Hanson Robotics and SingularityNet Foundation.
Perun Rocket
Last fall, Copernic Space sold 24 payload slots on the October test flight of the Perun rocket from Poland’s SpaceForest.
“We sold it out in about a day and a half,” Blaisdell said.
Perun payload customers included crypto startups, artists, a music festival and a Ukrainian philanthropic organization that sponsored the flight…
Read the full article here