Explorers have been dreaming about living and working on the moon for generations, and this might just become possible.
Four NASA veterans and a more extended team are working on the very first decentralized space program.
The target of this new settlement will be to develop self-sustaining agriculture and industrialization.
Coral is the first mission concept
Space Cooperative reveals their first mission concept, the Coral.
Coral is named after the marine coral that builds extensive and elaborate structures using minerals that they extract from seawater.
The coral uses local resources to perform additive manufacturing, and in human terms, this equates to 3D printing.
The Coral program aims to be this effective at extracting local resources aka regolith on the moon and transform them into durable and useful structures.
Space Decentral is involved
Space Cooperative is leading the program in fact, but it is presented as a collab project for Space Decentral which is a decentralized autonomous space agency.
Together these two will leverage blockchain technologies and processes invented by Aragon, Giveth, and Harbour Project, alongside our Planning App, to develop a citizen-led space program.
Space Decentral’s governance and operations will be mediated by smart contracts, using Aragon, an organization that builds DApps on the Ethereum blockchain to help new startups securely manage their organization and governance.
Coral’s phases
The initial phase of the program will take place on Earth where the team will “will assess the ability of mining, milling, beneficiation, and additive manufacturing (3D printing) equipment to function when utilizing lunar-like material,” according to a blog post on Medium.
The next phase will involve designing and developing hardware for launching to the moon.
They will be able to propose projects for activation and help with the other tasks.
This mission still needs approval and support of the Space Decentral community to get funded and launch to space.
If everything goes as planned, it will be the first project of the network.
You can learn more details about the project on from their Medium post.