Space Startup, Spacebit, To Launch Moon Mission By 2021

Spacebit will be launching its space "spiders" to take HD pictures of the moon in 2021, but it's not the arachnid kind.

The startup based in the United Kingdom is teaming up with Latin American partners -- marking the first time companies from that region will partake in a lunar mission -- to produce hardware for space exploration: a rover with legs.

The two new partners are Ecuadorian Civilian Space Agency (EXA), and Mexico's Dereum. Their role is to aid in developing the robotics that Spacebit will need for their rover to walk successfully on legs rather than wheels, as reported by TechCrunch.

"We are planning on doing a swarm technology exploration plan, where we have multiple small spider walking rovers deployed from a wheeled mothership, along with being able to have some redundancy and the ability to do 3D lidar scanning of the interior lunar caves and lava tubes," CEO Pavlo Tanasyuk said.

Before the rover gets to the moon, it will take a ride on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket and will land using a Peregrine Moon Lander. At 2 pounds in weight, the rover will crawl 33 feet away from the lander while capturing HD videos.

Spacebit will be based on a DaaS (data as a service) business model as Tanasyuk explains, "Our primary focus for early missions are to do exploration and mapping of lunar lava tubes to be able to characterize the lunar subsurface environment for potential suitability for future human habitation."

Apart from learning if humans can hang their hat on the moon, the company also wants to democratize space exploration. They want everyone to benefit just as much as governments on space projects. To do so, Spacebit is experimenting on using blockchain technology to make space exploration more decentralized and provide more liquidity to the space market.

Speaking at the Digital Catapult Centre, Tanasyuk said, "I strongly believe that the future of space exploration is distributed, where actually crowds can participate."

"Crowds can invest, crowds can benefit from space exploration, and crowds can actually engage in space exploration as well, which is very important, starting with schools and all the way up."