Many see private space tourism as a glimmer of hope for humanity becoming a multiplanetary species. So far, more than 600 humans have traveled outside Earth’s atmosphere, but the typical price tag on such a trip makes it inaccessible to most people.
MoonDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization using blockchain technology to put space “in the hands of the people.” Its international community uses governance tokens to vote on funding research and exploration initiatives, including the purchase of two tickets to board Blue Origin.
One of those tickets was reserved for anyone who minted one of MoonDAO’s 9,060 free space NFTs to win through a publicly auditable drawing powered by Chainlink VRF, the blockchain industry’s leading decentralized on-chain random number generator. The winner was selected and notified on June 11th and will be announced to the MoonDAO community after completing Blue Origin’s astronaut training requirements.
MoonDAO awarded its second Blue Origin ticket by having its members use their governance tokens to vote on a company they wanted to sponsor. The winning organization was Dude Perfect, a Texas-based digital sports and entertainment company which boasts the fourth biggest YouTube sports channel.
Dude Perfect’s five founding members held a rocket-launching contest to determine who among them would go to space. The winner, Dude Perfect co-founder Coby Cotton, joined five other crew members aboard New Shepard NS-22 to complete Blue Origin’s sixth human space flight. The reusable rocket, which carried Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to space in 2021, launched just before 10:00 a.m. EDT this morning and returned to Earth 10 minutes later.
Last month, MoonDAO co-founder Pablo Moncada-Larrotiz told Chainlink Today that integrating decentralized technology like Chainlink VRF is essential to ensuring the transparency and integrity of the organization to its international community.
“We want to improve collaboration between people from all over the world and give them the funds to work together on the biggest problems facing humanity today: becoming a multi-planet species and overcoming The Great Filter,” he said.
Today, Moncada-Larrotiz told Chainlink Today that Cotton’s successful space mission is just the beginning of what MoonDAO aims to accomplish.
“Coby’s selection shows the democratic voting power of a DAO, and our next Chainlink VRF-selected astronaut demonstrates the verifiably random and decentralized power of a DAO,” he said. “MoonDAO aims to make space accessible to anyone in the world, regardless of their financial means, and Coby’s monumental flight sets the stage for what DAOs are capable of achieving.”
To learn more about MoonDAO, visit their website, Twitter, Discord, and GitHub.
Watch the complete New Shepard NS-22 launch livestream.