Lunar Mission One: Is crowdsourcing the future of space exploration?

Space exploration has always captivated us. In July 1969, roughly 723 million people watched in awe as Neil Armstrong made history and set foot onto the moon. More recently, one of the biggest news stories of the year was the first ever controlled landing on a comet, 310 million miles away from Earth.

However, despite the enthralling nature of space exploration, it often seems like governments do not consider it a particularly important endeavour. NASA’s budget has been consistently slashed over the decades; it has been 42 years since a human being last set foot on the moon.

If governmental interest in space exploration is lacking, then perhaps its future lies with crowdsourcing from the general public. Lunar Mission One is a UK project partially funded by Kickstarter, which aims to send an unmanned robotic landing module to the Moon’s south pole in 2024. With the promise of unearthing secrets of the moon’s history and guarantee that backers will have the chance to be a part of space history, the mission comfortably reached its goal of $600,000 and achieved $672,447 in total from public donations.

Described as “the most inspirational mission to the moon since the Apollo landings”, the project seeks to explore the geological composition of the moon by using pioneering technology to drill down beneath the moon’s surface by at least 20m. Through this, we will gain an insight into the Moon’s relationship with our planet, as well as a better understanding of whether the Moon’s south pole is a suitable location for a permanent human base.

To entice potential backers, the mission offered a number of rewards for those who donated on Kickstarter. Perhaps the most notable of these is the digital memory box, which is the reward for those who donated £60 or more. These memory boxes will allow users to upload digital information of their choice- whether it’s a song, poem or personal message. They will then be buried deep inside the Moon, as part of a private archive. Such rewards, which give backers an opportunity to be directly involved with space exploration, have encouraged thousands of people across the world to donate.

With its combination of inspirational ambition and use of rewards that encourage involvement with the project, Lunar Mission One is an example of how crowdsourcing can be a successful way of gaining funds for space exploration projects. Furthermore, it’s not the only space-based project that was successfully funded on Kickstarter. For example, a project called ARKYD, described as a publicly accessible space telescope that will study distant galaxies (as well as allowing people on Earth to take “Space Selfies”), gained over one and a half million dollars in donations last year. Another similar project is the ArduSat Mission, which is a satellite that allows the general public to design and run their own space-based games and experiments. Again, this project was successfully funded and gained over triple the $35,000 goal.

Crowdsourcing then is an obviously powerful method of gaining funds for space exploration projects and one that will inevitably be taken advantage of for future space missions. As Lunar Mission One and other similar projects prove, the opportunity to engage the general public through incentives and get them directly involved (whether it’s through digital memory boxes or space selfies) is a hugely influential tool in raising both funds and publicity which would otherwise not be available.

So whilst funding from the government will always be a primary source of income for space missions (a budget increase in 2015 for NASA was recently confirmed in fact), the success of projects such as Lunar Mission One and the eagerness of the public to get directly engage with space, will establish reward-based crowdsourcing as an important part of the future of space exploration.