Hey Reader,

Welcome to Mooney Monday, the weekly newsletter from MoonDAO! In this newsletter, we will keep you up to date on the latest developments in the world of space exploration and the progress of the MoonDAO community.

Whether you're a space enthusiast, a blockchain enthusiast, or just someone who is curious about the future of space exploration, Mooney Monday has something for you. We hope you enjoy this weekly newsletter and that it inspires you to join the MoonDAO community and help us make space exploration accessible to everyone.

Bite-Sized Space News

• 50 years ago today humans were walking on the Moon for the very last time! Apollo 17, the final mission in NASA's Apollo program, occurred from Dec 7, 1972 – Dec 19, 1972. The mission was crewed by astronauts Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt. Cernan and Schmitt were the last humans to set foot on the Moon, they spent a total of three days (Dec 11 – Dec 14) on the lunar surface conducting scientific experiments and collecting samples. While no humans have returned to the Moon (yet), there have been numerous robotic missions to study the lunar surface (another one just launched yesterday). You can follow along in real-time to relive Apollo 17 moments as they happened.

• ​dearMoon: Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has announced the eight artists selected to join him on a future mission around the Moon. The previously-announced 2023 launch date is likely to be pushed back substantially, however, as Starship has not yet been approved for an orbital journey around Earth, let alone a flight to the Moon. Crew members include Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut who was among the candidates MoonDAO voted on with the Ticket to Space NFT. Maezawa's dearMoon project was announced in 2018 to bring citizen astronauts on a flight around the Moon.
• ​A Japanese private moon lander carrying a United Arab Emirates (UAE) rover has been launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The Hakuto-R lander was launched yesterday in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and is scheduled to land on the Moon in April 2023. If successful, it will be the first soft landing of a Japanese-made spacecraft. The UAE's 22-pound (10 kg) Rashid robot will take photos of the Moon's surface and analyze its surface environment after deploying from the lander.
• ​NASA's Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft has safely landed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico's Baja Peninsula, completing its 25.5-day mission to the Moon. The splashdown marked the end of NASA's historic Artemis 1 moon mission, which was a test of the Orion spacecraft and its associated ground systems. Early indications show that all of the systems passed the test. The Artemis 1 mission is a step towards NASA's goal of returning astronauts to the Moon in 2024 with the launch of Artemis II.

Space Trivia

Approximately how many people have gone to space?

Keep reading for the correct answer.

MoonDAO Updates

Phase 2 Compensation Final

Three major (and somewhat contentious) proposals have gone through Snapshot governance to determine how much compensation to provide Phase 2 contributors, including how much DAI/ETH, Mooney, and how much for each project. Phase 2 was the culmination of more than nine months of work through September of this year and saw some truly incredible achievements by 55 MoonDAO team members from all over the world, who worked with little to no compensation during that time.

The final result (taken as an average of all votes) was to distribute 30% of the Treasury’s total supply of Mooney and 38% of the supply of DAI/ETH. There was a small but vocal minority strongly opposed to releasing Mooney from the Treasury. After much dialogue back and forth and internal debate within the Senate, members of the Senate proposed to voluntarily lower compensation to 30% of DAI and 9% of Mooney, and will send the decision back to voters on Snapshot to ratify the final amount and decide whether to respect the initial vote result, enact the senate compromise, or select one of the other viable options.

The DAI will be paid out as a lump sum to all eligible contributors, while the Mooney will only be distributed to those who remain actively contributing to MoonDAO and will be steadily streamed via smart contract over the course of one year (and will be halted if a contributor stops working for the DAO). Of the 55 contributors, only eight are still active within MoonDAO and thus eligible to receive the streamed Mooney.

The DAI stablecoin payments are meant to ensure that our most dedicated workers have the means to earn a living in the real world, while the Mooney is like a golden carrot providing more say in the governance of the organization that they are working so hard to build and encouraging those valued members to stick around.

Beginning with Q4, Mooney will be distributed on the previously approved geometric release schedule that diminishes each quarter (starting at 40 million and then 0.95 of that amount released every quarter after that) and there is also discussion about allocating a certain percent of DAI in the Treasury (with an upper limit) going forward as to avoid these contentious votes and provide more clarity to all involved.

MoonDAO Documentary Approved

Results from the vote are in and it’s official: MoonDAO is going to be making a movie! Voters approved working with the documentary team and provided initial seed funding of $100,000 to help production get off the ground. You can see the pitch deck and premise for the documentary, but the basic idea is that it will follow the story of our future astronaut, Yan KeJun, who won the Ticket to Space NFT raffle, as he ventures from China to the United States to launch abroad a future Blue Origin flight.

To complete the movie, a crowd fundraising campaign is in the works via StudioDAO for our community and others to come together and support the production of this important film that will tell the story not only of Yan’s Ticket to Space, but also of what MoonDAO is hoping to achieve, our ideals, and why we think space should be open to all, not just billionaires.

Stay tuned for more details about the fundraise, how you can contribute, and some of the special benefits for those that do.

Town Hall with Robert Zubrin of Mars Society

​Listen to a recording of today’s town hall where we briefly discussed some MoonDAO updates and also welcomed a special guest: Robert Zubrin from the Mars Society. The Mars Society is a nonprofit organization that promotes the exploration and settlement of Mars and is one of the oldest advocacy groups pushing for humanity to become multi-planetary.

Mars Society was founded in 1998 by Dr. Robert Zubrin, a well-known advocate for human space exploration. Zubrin is a nuclear engineer and aerospace engineer who has written extensively on the subject of Mars exploration and has developed several plans for human missions to the Red Planet. The Mars Society conducts research, education, and advocacy activities to support the goal of sending humans to Mars.

The conversation today with Robert Zubrin was fascinating as we tackled a whole myriad of issues including the increase military funding for space and how that will trickle down into more funding for commercial and civilian uses, the paradigm shift posed by the Starship and a burgeoning market of reusable (and eventually used rockets for sale in the future), energy considerations and limitations for future settlements on Mars or the Moon, and so much more.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out his book The Case for Space, which a few of us are reading as part of the MoonDAO Book Club.

Active Votes

There are no active votes on Snapshot at this time, but there are a few in the works, including the previously mentioned ratification of Phase 2 compensation, the replacement of an inactive member of the multi-sig, and approving the charter for the Space Engineering guild – so stay tuned and be sure that you have staked your Mooney for vMooney to participate.

MoonDAO Bounties

There are seven open bounties on DeWork right now from our four guilds. The MoonDAO mascot bounty has closed and we will be voting on a winner soon, and here are two more interesting bounties to check out and potentially earn some Mooney. Be sure to join our DeWork bounty page to explore them all and stay up to date with future opportunities to work for MoonDAO.

​Create a video for the MoonDAO Community​
$500 USD in Mooney
Open to Applications

​Satellite CAD for MoonDAO​
50,000 Mooney
Open to Applications

That’s it for your MoonDAO updates this week. Join us on Discord to stay up-to-date with all the latest developments.

Space Trivia Answer: B – NASA's tally of the number of people who have gone to space passed 600 earlier this year. The tally began over 60 years ago in 1961, when Yuri Gagarin, a Russian astronaut, became the first human to orbit the Earth. Alan Shepard, the first U.S. astronaut, went to space less than a month later. The number of people traveling to space has increased in recent years, and this trend is expected to accelerate as private spaceflight missions for wealthy tourists become more common, and MoonDAO is striving to ensure that opportunities for regular people increase too!