Sending Cardano NFTs to the Moon! Well… Maybe to the Next Best Place
The day was March 25th, 2021, and I had been a part of the Cardano community for about one year now and I saw something going around on Twitter about something called “SpaceBudz”. So I thought to myself, “That sounds like fun. Let me look into it.” I followed the link to the site and bought my very first cNFT (Non-Fungible Token on Cardano). Once the transaction went through and the site verified this, an animation of a rocket was launched to reveal my first SpaceBud. So when the team from Ascension Sciences messaged me about partnering with them on what would become Project Cosmos on Cardano around 6 months later, it immediately brought me back to that moment of minting my first SpaceBud and seeing that rocket take off. I thought to myself, “This is a chance to actually send my SpaceBudz up to space, for real!” — Marco Guererro, Buffybot Publishing
About Project Cosmos on Cardano
The Ascension Sciences team & Buffybot Publishing have come together to test new ways of funding scientific pursuits. The idea behind Project Cosmos on Cardano is to offer the Cardano community a chance to participate by offering them the chance to buy sponsorship slots. There will be 750 sponsorship slots made available to the Cardano community via projectcosmos.io starting Friday, November 26th, 2021. These will be available for a discounted price of 1000 ADA per slot throughout the end of the month. After that, the price of sponsorship will be 1500 ADA per slot.
Now let’s talk about what you get for sponsoring a slot: You will be issued a Mission Access Token (a cNFT) for each slot you purchase, which you will be able to pair with a cNFT that you own. We will then use the artwork from your cNFT (for example a SpaceBud, Zombie Chained, Yummi, or Claymate) to print a physical asset (credit card sized) that will be included as part of a spaceflight experiment. After the study is over and the physical assets have returned to Earth, we will turn your Mission Access Token into a Certificate of Authenticity that features details of the experiment and send it along with the physical asset back to you. So to recap, you will get a physical card that features artwork from a cNFT you own, which will come with a matching cNFT that will have a record of your card’s journey to space and back.
There are a few things we are hoping to test with Project Cosmos on Cardano. The first is using these printed sponsored cards to explore computer memory performance in space. “Corruption of memory on these types of cards limits their useability in space applications,” the Ascension Sciences team says, “If we figure out how to make them resilient, it can help scientists fly new types of sensors”. The team will analyze the data stored in memory embedded in the cards before and after the flight to determine if radiation in space caused any corruption. The second part of the study is how we can use cNFTs to help fund projects like this.
The first two sets of physical asset NFTs in space
Project Cosmos on Cardano will be the second study/venture between the Ascension Sciences team and Buffybot Publishing. The first was Project Ascension. “Commercial electronics are lightyears ahead of computers built specifically for space,” the team says, “But we can’t use them because of how they are built”. We are flying a set of 25 tin and titanium plates to explore how tin whiskers grow in a microgravity environment. Tin whiskers are tiny filaments that can cause computers to short circuit in space, and why they grow in space is currently unknown. The team’s plan is to grow these filaments in space and then measure them when the plates are back on the ground to estimate growth rate compared to a set of control plates on the ground.
The plates will also be minted as cNFTs and feature the policy ID on each test plate, making them the first objects to go to space and back that are paired with a matching NFT — another first on the Cardano blockchain. The Project Ascension launch is scheduled for February 2022 and will remain on the International Space Station for 10 months before returning to Earth.
Ascension Sciences is a team of rocket scientists who proudly operate Viper Staking on Cardano. Buffybot Publishing team is made up of Marco Guerrero & Adam Dean.
