SpaceX Accepts Dogecoin As Payment For Moon Mission Next Year
SpaceX will launch the “DOGE-1 Mission to the Moon" next year and it's being paid for using the dog meme-inspired, irony-soaked cryptocurrency Dogecoin. (Now imagine explaining that sentence to a person 100 years ago. Hell, even 15 years ago.) The DOGE-1 Mission to the Moon will see SpaceX collaborate with Geometric Energy Corporation to send a 40 kilogram (88 pound) minisatellite to the Moon onboard a Falcon 9 rocket in the first quarter of 2022. The payload will be used to pick up information on the lunar surface using sensors and onboard cameras. Geometric Energy Corporation confirmed the plans on Sunday, May 9, revealing that the mission would be paid for using Dogecoin. However, the company did not reveal the mission’s financial value. Elon Musk regularly references his penchant for Dogecoin on Twitter and he's even hinted about this plan by tweeting he was going to put a “literal Dogecoin on the literal moon.” However, the off-hand statement was cracked on April Fool’s Day, leaving most people to assume it was just another Musk joke. It turns out, this was deadly serious. "This mission will demonstrate the application of cryptocurrency beyond Earth orbit and set the foundation for interplanetary commerce," Tom Ochinero, SpaceX Vice President of Commercial Sales, said in a press release. "We're excited to launch DOGE-1 to the Moon!"
"Having officially transacted with DOGE for a deal of this magnitude, Geometric Energy Corporation and SpaceX have solidified DOGE as a unit of account for lunar business in the space sector," added Geometric Energy's Chief Executive Officer Samuel Reid.Dogecoin is an open-source peer-to-peer digital currency that was established as a fun and friendly alternative to the overly earnest world of cryptocurrency. Its name – pronounced “Doje” with a soft G – is a reference to the internet meme featuring a Shiba Inu dog that emerged on Tumblr during its glory days in the early 2010s. The Dogecoin cryptocurrency was established in 2013 as a joke, but it has recently risen to become the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market value, soaring in value by 14,000 percent since January 2021. While cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are becoming more widely accepted as payment, Dogecoin is currently only accepted by a small handful of businesses and platforms (private space travel being one of them, apparently).Musk has massively raised the profile of dogecoin through his online jesting. The cryptocurrency also got a boost when he tweeted that Tesla would soon accept Dogecoin as payment. On the other hand, he recently caused its value to plummet after describing it as a “hustle” during his appearance on the comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live.Although rest assured, however, it will certainly not be the last time you hear about this surreal lovechild of cryptocurrency and internet memes.
A joke cryptocurrency has risen more than 26,000% in the last six months, outpacing nearly every other investment
In 2013, software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer launched the satirical cryptocurrency as a way to make fun of bitcoin and the many other cryptocurrencies boasting grand plans to take over the world.Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency branded after a viral dog meme from years ago, hit a new all-time high Friday afternoon. It now has a market capitalization of about $92 billion following a six-month climb of more than 26,000 percent.Over that same time period, the S&P was up 19 percent, while crypto rivals bitcoin and ether were up 286 percent and 698 percent, respectively, according to CoinMarketCap. And stock market darling Tesla? It is up 56 percent since November.“The joke is on Wall Street this time,” said Mati Greenspan, portfolio manager and founder of Quantum Economics. “What you have is a situation where teens on TikTok are outperforming even the smartest suits by thousands of percentage points.”
They called it dogecoin – pronounced “doje coin” with a soft “g” sound – after the once-popular “doge” shiba inu meme. Its purpose? To be a faster but “fun” alternative to bitcoin.“The appeal of dogecoin has always been its honesty,” Galaxy’s researchers Alex Thorn and Karim Helmy explained in a note to clients on May 4. “Unlike many other cryptocurrency projects...there’s no grand vision, no pronouncements about how dogecoin will change the world.”In addition, while bitcoin has a capped supply of 21 million coins, there is currently no limit to the number of dogecoins that can be created. “One of the value propositions of bitcoin is digital scarcity; that there will only be 21 million,” said Greenspan. “There is no such hard cap [with dogecoin], and it has a really crazy inflation schedule.”
The Elon Musk effect
It isn’t totally clear when or why dogecoin captured the heart of Elon Musk. The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO has spent years talking up the token. Musk’s tweets with sometimes oblique references to dogecoin often send it to new record-high prices. These posts have also helped drive retail investor interest.“You have this one guy who is sort of like the cult leader,” said Asheesh Birla, a general manager at Ripple, which manages an alternative cryptocurrency used for payments.Musk, however, isn’t alone in his celebrity endorsement of the animal-branded token. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Snoop Dogg and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons have all publicly rallied behind dogecoin. Even beef jerky brand Slim Jim is getting in on the action.Its price surge this week, attributed by one analyst to Elon Musk’s upcoming “Saturday Night Live” appearance on May 8, even managed to briefly crash Robinhood’s trading app.But there is more to dogecoin’s record price run than just celebrity backing.
Market conditions have also been right. Multiple rounds of stimulus checks have meant people have more money on hand to spend. Apps like Robinhood have made it easier than ever for the casual investor to make a bet on stocks, turning day-trading into a pandemic pastime. There is also the enduring sentiment to “stick it” to the establishment. “Dogecoin is like this kind of big F-U to the system,” said Avi Felman, Head of Trading at BlockTower Capital. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, this thing can have value, too. And I’m just going to buy it, because I’m going to buy it.’”Experts say the dynamic is reminiscent of the GameStop trading frenzy from earlier this year.“Elon is basically pushing up this message of, ‘Why can’t dogecoin have value?’” said Felman. “It’s part of the GameStop boom. People like these narratives. They like these stories. They like these jokes. And dogecoin just captured the mind and imagination of every single retail investor.”The rise of commission-free trading through online brokerage apps like Robinhood also made it easier than ever to buy into crypto. “You have a rabid online community,” Birla said of the fanbase of doge evangelists. “You have Twitter and Reddit, where they’re all sort of congregating and thinking about how to pump dogecoin.”
SpaceX could land astronauts on the moon in 2024, Elon Musk says
Elon Musk doesn't think NASA's 2024 moon-landing goal is out of reach.The space agency is working to get people back to the moon via its Artemis program, which aims to establish a long-term, sustainable human presence on and around Earth's nearest neighbor by the end of the 2020s. In 2019, the Trump administration directed NASA to make the first crewed Artemis landing by 2024. Experts have generally viewed that target as overly ambitious, and it's unclear whether the timeline will hold under President Joe Biden. But Musk, SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO, thinks it is indeed achievable with the company's Starship deep-space transportation system, which NASA recently selected as Artemis' crewed moon lander. "I think it will happen. I think 2024 seems likely," Musk said Friday morning (April 23) in a news conference after the successful launch of SpaceX's Crew-2 mission, which is sending four astronauts to the International Space Station under a contract with NASA's Commercial Crew Program."We're gonna aim for sooner than that," he added.
Indeed, Musk said he thinks Starship — a giant, reusable rocket-spaceship combo — could be flying people regularly by 2023."Obviously, we need to, like, not be making craters," he said with a laugh. "Got some work to do, but making rapid progress. We've got to make sure we're accelerating the rate of innovation, and then it could be ready in a couple years."The craters remark is a reference to the Starship test-flight campaign, which has been quite explosive recently. Since December 2020, SpaceX has conducted four high-altitude test flights of Starship prototypes at the company's South Texas facilities. All four vehicles performed well for most of the flight, but none of them managed to stick the landing (though one did touch down in one piece, only to explode a few minutes later). Those flights involved iterations of the 165-foot-tall (50 meters) Starship spacecraft, which is known (somewhat confusingly) as Starship.
The giant first-stage rocket that will launch Starship off Earth is called Super Heavy. SpaceX has built a Super Heavy prototype but has not yet flown one.SpaceX is getting set to take another crack at the Starship high-altitude test flight. The latest prototype, named SN15 ("Serial No. 15"), is on the pad in South Texas, going through a series of preflight checkouts.Musk acknowledged that his target timelines tend to be optimistic and should be taken "with a grain of salt." But the occasion of today's news conference offers some reason for optimism, highlighting as it did SpaceX's human spaceflight achievements (albeit with a different transportation system, the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule). With Crew-2 safely on its way to the space station, SpaceX has now launched three crewed missions to Earth orbit in less than 12 months.