# The Social and Economic Fabric of Decentralized Space Development by Yalda Mousavinia (Devcon4)

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Duration: 23:06
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-CqbLoG4S7rQ
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqbLoG4S7rQ

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/4/the-social-and-economic-fabric-of-decentralized-space-development

Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding has existed in the aerospace industry for decades, although usually they occur independent from one another. With the advent of cryptoeconomics, incentive systems can be designed that synergize crowdsourcing and crowdfunding in new ways to enable mass coordination in open source space development. Space Decentral is a DAO building a citizen-led space agency, with a novel governance model and ultimate goal of bringing humanity together to collectively accomplish the impossible.
Project proposals are vetted and curated by the Space Decentral community, with curation leading towards project activation for volunteer-driven crowdsourcing. Ethical complications arise when volunteers help bootstrap for-profit entities without legal protections in place for ownership. To solve for this, Space Decentral's projects will use a tokenized task management system built on top of Aragon, that will track individual work contributions. By participating in Space Decentral, the expectation is: should a nascent mission spin-off into a new entity (such as a child DAO) each individual’s stake will be measured by the non-transferable tokens collected, which will be transparently accounted for on Ethereum. This new collaborative model is generic and can be applicable to any organization that wants to combine crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

Speaker(s): Yalda Mousavinia
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Society and Systems
Keywords: space, exploration, economics

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 4 was held in Prague, Czech Republic on Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2018.
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## Transcript

so yeah I will be presenting the social and economic fabric of decentralized space development so a little bit about me I he said I co-founded space cooperative so you might be like what's the space cooperative what's space T central space cooperative is the initial worker owned cooperative that we formed in 2016 and that led eventually towards space T central this futurist Giulio Chris co-wrote an article and medium called a decentralized autonomous space agency so that was about you know five five months after we formed so we decided to we just met on the internet and started collaborating and we decided to converge converge visions essentially and we didn't even meet in person until about like one month ago so whenever he came to California to you know visit his daughter but basically whenever we formed the company the the vision was creating a space mission collaboration platform so he can crowdsource and crowdfund space missions and whenever Giulio laid out you know the concept of a space now in this article it made so much sense because you know it's like you can utilize the the transparent nature and the coordination mechanisms that you know smart contracts provide to allow that you know connection to happen and to to allow it to be so we're not you know the the only organization in control of how this space agency is going to operate so a lot of people you know might say well you know why focus on space when there are so many problems on earth and what I often say is you know there are there are a lot of reasons why space actually benefits earth first you know if we're exploring the universe where we're learning things about you know Humanity that we don't know before whether like you know life exists outside of Earth it's like there are so many you know galaxies out there and it would be amazing to actually explore them the second thing as far as like you know knowledge and understanding goes is you know space is such a heart harsh environment that it's also an another way to actually advance knowledge and technology to be able to live in these harsh environments and through these I'm governments you actually earned through developing these technologies you actually they're like spin-off technologies that are applicable to earth-2 like for example insulation that's used in a lot of housing you know that was initially for space because of the you know extreme temperatures and other thing as far as like you know climate change we wouldn't know about climate change or how the temperature of the earth has been changing if it wasn't for satellite technology and then like GPS constellation it's like we still use that every day I know there's foam you know is attempting to replace it in ways but I think it'll probably be a long time until that actually be homes fully mainstream and then lastly asteroid mining probably heard the news yesterday that consensus just acquired an asteroid mining firm which is very interesting we'll talk more about that later but there are a lot of benefits as far as like asteroid mining goes because it's like we live in Earth and it's always like you know it's this mindset of scarcity so with asteroid mining can you know move towards more post scarcity as far as like oh my god there are so many resources outside earth and the same mentality goes as far as like colonizing or settling on other planets okay so that's like a little bit of background for you know why space is important besides like the fantasy and a lore of truly becoming a spacefaring civilization so what is space T Central it's a decentralized autonomous agency when we're aiming to essentially reinvigorate the push for sorry for Space Exploration with global citizens and control so it's decentralized because no single corporation or nation will be responsible for its management its autonomous because member control over how members will control over how work is directed how decisions are made and which projects to fund and it's a Space Agency because it's gonna be very strategic you know it's like the network will decide you know which which programs to fund which projects to develop so it's like if you combine these these three you got like you know you can we can tap into the curiosity that's you know in our human it's in our evolution to explore we can like finally if you have like the drive and the motivation to actually want to work on space it's like you can participate in it it's like it's like how do we make it so anyone can like work on space it's such like a fascinating thing I hope I can do it for the rest of my life like how can we enable anyone to participate that's what we want to do and essentially it's like you know citizen-led through that and through this combination it's about expansion expansion you know to throughout the universe expansion of our knowledge like expansion of like humanity in general so end this talk I'm gonna talk a little bit about aerospace crowd history as far as like crowdfunding and crowdsourcing and that will sort of lead towards a transition of talking about the XPrize and then space T Central and then I'm going to talk about phase one of how space use decentral is initially working right now and then the phase two of how it ideally will work so the history of crowdsourcing in aerospace it can kind of it starts in ninth in the 1900s with the Deutsch prize and that was a hundred thousand dollar French franc prize for the first airship to fly from the Parc st. cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back in under 30 minutes so it was about 11 kilometers total and the winner of that was Alberto santos-dumont and he was a Brazilian and then there might have been like a lot of other prizes in between them but some of the most significant recent ones were the Ansari XPrize and that was the first XPrize in 1996 and that was a 10 million dollar prize for the first non-governmental organization to launch a reasonable man spacecraft into space you know twice within two weeks and that prize was actually awarded that took about eight years and then the most recent one that I'm sure a lot of you have heard about was the Google Lunar XPrize and that lasted from 2007 to twenty eighteen and it was a 30 million dollar prize and that was for you know landing a robot on the surface of the Moon and traveling 500 meters over the surface and sending the images and data back to earth and what happened was nobody actually won that prize but all of these companies were formed through that process that have received way more funding than the prize even was and there are a few examples that I think are significant I had a typo on the first one but that should be space IL and that was the Israeli group and there were a non-profit but they were able to actually receive ninety five million dollars of funding from various sources such as philanthropists like Sheldon out Sheldon Adelson who donated 16.4 million and also some of the leaders of the group that you know had wealth I space was a Japanese organization and they actually just recently secured ninety two million dollars in funding and Moon Express is also like a for-profit based business and they've received a total of 65 million dollars worth of funding so even though none of these organizations actually won the prize it's like there was you know a lot of advancement and technology that will enable other people to use these Landers that a lot of them have built to actually get to the moon you know faster and more efficiently and then as far as like the history of crowdfunding and aerospace goes and one of the first successful examples was Planetary Resources arkad spacecraft and the reward that they were giving on Kickstarter was you can take your self-portrait while this spacecraft is traveling through space and that campaign happened in 2013 but actually in 2016 they decided to cancel it and give everyone their money back because there wasn't really enough support to fully go through with that mission and then the other example was a planetary societies light sale and that was like a solar sailing type spacecraft and it's a it's to use a solar sail as a propulsion mechanism and that first mission there was also some failure associated with it and then another more recent one has to do with a telescope and that was in 2017 it's like more of a personal telescope and that was a 2.2 million dollar campaign so these are like quite small as far as like citizen crowdfunding goes but you can also think of the XPrize as a crowdfunding mechanism since for example the Google Lunar XPrize that was sponsored by Google so it's like larger organizations can actually collectively potentially sponsor larger prizes and this is where we can start to talk about space to central and what we're up to so right now we have a lunar program called coral and it's a open source lunar space program and the objective is to essentially demonstrate in situ resource utilization technology or is ru it's a 3d print on the lunar on the lunar surface using essentially moon dust or regolith as the feedstock of what goes into the 3d printer and then so this is our flagship mission it was selected by the founders of the of space II central or Space cooperative but I'll talk more in the future about how we'll select the next missions so whenever we asked a lot of the community about why they join this mission you know what what motivated you to join these were the different responses that we got you know some some were just want to make friends with like-minded people they're just as simple as like space a chance to participate in something new to be an asset to society and then there were other responses that were more related towards you know the the mission at hand which was interest in interest in space resource utilization or potential for advancing interesting lunar projects so we launched this around July and like I said this is our first mission and our first mission is actually not just the founders of the company but it is the global community so there are people participating right now from India from Australia from Sweden as far as like their nationalities go from the UK Canada a lot from the US and also Puerto Rico and Brazil so so the people you see in this photo these are like some of the people that were fart up part of space cooperative but but then also the people that are part of space cooperative and space T central as a community as well so how does it initially work we don't operate on the ethereum blockchain today but that's the phase two that I'll talk about next so right now we have a space T central dotnet it's a social network that we host and it's this is just like the first iteration of it it's very basic it has a forum you know it's connected to Google Drive because that's what a lot of us still use as far as document collaboration goes and then we do our task management and github so this is like some of the tasks for our choral mission right now you can see it's like you know writing reports on the manufacturing methods or the different trade studies and you know maintaining the document library here's an example of a good trade study that the community is working on right now to determine the manufacturing method whether it's like microwave centering solar sintering so this is just like a collaboration of all those people that I showed you before and this is another like interesting one there was like a task design a logo and like we got like first that one and then someone submitted that one and then this is the most recent one we got on the right and there wasn't even any like bounty associated with this it was just like hey like someone they still people were still doing it even though there wasn't any money associated to it and that's like the interesting part as far as like working on space projects go because I actually wanted to talk more about the Israeli organization space il like I said they had a 95 million in funding and they only had they had 30 paid members but 200 plus volunteers so so that's like the interesting like competition of actually forming it as a non-profit because you can because there are people that want to work on space that don't actually care about getting paid for it and that's that's exciting like I mean I've been working on this for two years and I've like you know self-funded it off of some like some ethereal after I purchased that out for the DAO hack but so yeah it's like I didn't I didn't put my money into it because I thought I wasn't rich I just I was just like this is I heard the calling and I'm like this is what I want to work on and then you start to see other people want to work on it and it's not because they think they're gonna get rich so how will they ideally work so this is how a space mission works for NASA you see it's it's highly complex if we build an International Space Agency it's not like we have to copy everything that NASA does you want to innovate make it a little bit more agile but the reason that like the the process of developing a space mission like this has all these different you know milestones critical design reviews a lot of different design reviews as you advance from developing a concept to actually like doing the system design to starting to prototype the hardware I mean that's why NASA missions they don't fail that much as far as like all the ones that have gone to Mars or you know the recent one like or the moon a lot of other you know countries have tried to go to Mars but haven't made it there so so this is just like an example of okay well how are we gonna translate all of these processes like to the blockchain and this is where you can start to see okay you know smart contracts might help with like how you assign peer reviewers or how you really sponding as you advance the you advance up the different milestones or maybe how you find teams to replace an existing team if they're not able to you know successfully deliver on like the prototypes so Spacey central we want to build a space agency in a box like we want to have the tool set so we can create an International citizen-led Space Agency but at the same time like we think this tool set can also be used by nation states that don't have space agencies yet you know how do we actually enable more nations to become spacefaring like the developing nations because I think that that's really the way to truly like the power is like giving as many people in the world access to technologies like the freedom to explore the universe and that's why a lot of our you know ideologies and missions are also based on doing as much as we can in an open-source manner like building a knowledge base that has you know all of a lot of the education that you need a lot of the different tools that you will need there are actually a lot of open-source tools out there already but there's no you know cohesive like enterprise suite or you know space enterprise suite that makes it actually easy to use every tool and for what we want to build you know aetherium will be the underlying like you know blockchain that everything will then layer on top of and and we've made a decision to utilize Aragon as far as our you know dap framework and governance goes because of a lot of like the shared ideologies and you know it's like a lot of people say oh aragon it's really complex and like I showed you that graph before we're like that's great that's a it can it can support a lot of the yeast cases that we need we need to build a complex system and maybe to build it you need a you know robust toolset so so um now I'll talk a little bit more about like how the ecosystem works with the tokens and the this example that I go through right now it's like like I said we're gonna be using Aragon and this this how this ecosystem works with the two tokens a lot of different organizations that want to do crowd sort like combining crowdsourcing and crowdfunding and you know like volunteer-driven projects can also use the same model so you know you can rename the tokens I do the same thing if there's nothing a space specific about like this initial mechanism but you know essentially will have a faster-than-light FTL that's our transferable token can be purchased and it'll be staked for governance rights and it's also used to prioritize programs so it has like a unique capability for um you know this is like one there's like one main token weighted vote and that's to select the program so you could think of it as similar to you know companies deciding which XPrize they want to fund you know they're like well if I'm gonna put 30 million and I want to choose that it's gonna be like a lunar prize so it's at the very high level not not saying that they have the ability to actually choose the winning team of that prize but actually to fund it the higher level like people that are passionate about initiatives and then the other token we have is the Spacey central network token or Sdn and that will be earned by people that are actually contributing to the space projects you know they're there working on the the projects they're earning these tokens and and this is important because like I said there are there gonna be a lot of volunteer driven projects and you're not going to have like all this like FTL to give it to every project but you want to give every get give an SDN token at least or sdn tokens for every task that is completed and that can later be like an accounting tool that you use to distribute FTL whenever or eath or other sources of funding as it comes in in the future to the project so as far as our space mission sorry okay so so like I said we selected the we selected coral as our first mission but right now to select our subsequent missions we have the space mission activation process and that's actually going on right now and and we're gonna and this is where we're gonna start to use Eragon to select our next missions but essentially right now people are just developing proposals submitting them and then through the tasks that people are working on on coral we'll be awarding sdn tokens and then if you collect a minimum amount of that you'll be able to participate in the activation votes for the next missions on the network so and then if your idea gets selected you also get more sdn tokens and then this is like the the unique part of it is you know the XPrize it's a lot of different teams competing but with this we want to make it like if you if your so if your mission was selected as the winning one it's open for the entire network to still collaborate on it it's like just because your team might have had a winning proposal doesn't mean that it would just be restricted to your team but at least there can be like priorities for you know the proposal team at least being able to work on the initial task and then you know this is how it can work as far as you know there's a project there are tasks the tasks have different Sdn people finish the tasks and then they collect the SDN for it and then later whenever there's a reward cycle they get the FTL reward and then so like I said before we're gonna do this with Eragon and right now we're developing a planning suite and the the codename for it is that planning suite and there are going to be six different apps or Eragon OS apps and they'll actually work in combination with was the other like you know token manager finance voting apps the Eragon is already building themselves and then we want to just like add an additional tool set for you know different types you know for range voting for being able to have like actually consensus voting whenever you're actually estimating how much the tasks are worth you can as a project team come to consensus on the value of it it's like that's where you don't need the entire like Douw to say how much that task is worth but the people that are actually just working on it and then an address book because not everyone's going to be using ens in the beginning but you are gonna have like a theorem addresses that you're regularly sending funds to so just like an easy way to to create a mapping between a human readable name and an address projects app that will actually initially integrate with github so you can do like a bounty system with an Eragon but eventually we also want to expand that more decentralized get solution like there's a tool called panda being built so that's a eventual migration for that and and the other rewards app that will be able to support the mechanisms that I just described so yeah this is like a design of the tokenized task management that's currently under development and then you know this is the rewards app and you know these are based on design patterns that Eragon has already built but with a little bit change with a few changes as well so yeah I mean that's about it the own it's unknown what the future holds but it's up to us to shape it if you want to collaborate there are details there and you can also stay in touch [Applause] you