Crowdfunding

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I started working on a survey aimed at people interested in space. The goal is to have the survey up on it's own easily promotable website, people fill it out, then they get the data.

Hopefully it will help us learn about ourselves to aid people in their crowd funding campaigns, or other activities aimed at utilising the crowd.

I put a google document up where anybody can join and work on the questions. I myself have no expertise in making surveys, but I don't see why it should be a show stopper.

I have shared this in all the forums I am active in to get some input to help with asking the right questions.

Space Crowd Survey

Any form of comment is welcome. Suggestions of where to find such data, suggestions about the title, suggestions about the questions, suggestions about hosting the survey etc...In itself this is an attempt at a crowd based project.

[Engineer]

Actually, there's a lot of questions who's survey results are out of date. I wrote a English paper on NASA funding decline not too long ago and was surprised at a specific paper I found:
Launius, R. D. (2003). Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight, 174 doi:10.1016/S0265-9646(03)00039-0
Very surprising all in all. But a lot of those surveys are out of date. Redoing them on a large scale would be a great first step. As for interests in space, I'd ask a multiple choice question such as "where should the nation focus its space efforts?", Lunar development, astroidal development, colonization of the moon, colonization of mars, military superiority, scientific research, other (please enter). And then some follow up questions depending on their choices. No more then 25 questions or give them a chance to opt out at different stages of the questionnaire. Hope this helps mate.

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Thanks for that, every single input I get helps.

Is there a good place to go to when one wants to find such surveys or studies?

I wouldn't mind looking through them for questions and also just to see how they are done.

Also this survey is aimed at a global audience, I am hoping to have it available in many languages.

I decided to have a go at this because I am aiming to aid in the development of a large scale collaborative open source "space program".

There have been several attempts. There are several current ones active /SpaceGAMBIT, MACH30, moonmars.org, exosphereinc/. There are some attempts of commercial companies trying to engage the "spacecrowd" like golden spike, or stott space, or planetary resources.

I would like there to be a global network that could do large scale R&D that would match the capability of companies like spaceX or bigelow aearospace, or virgin galactic. MACH30 for instance is aiming for such a goal.

But the progress seems to be extremely slow if any. We all work on assumptions about the "crowd", and are trying to engage the crowd based on these assumptions. I think because these assumptions are off, we cannot really make any good progress towards large scale collaboration.

This survey would be my noobish attempt at tackling this problem. Instead of assumptions, it would provide data for such projects to work with.

Also with hosting it on a website, I am hoping to develop it into a continuous monitoring system, that could feedback data from the crowd towards these organisations or the crowd itself. So people could know more about the metrics of their collective activities.

Lots of hopes and dreams as you can see.

I hope that helped clear up where I am coming from and where I am trying to head with this project.

[Engineer]

In all honesty, when it comes to the crowd, I have very low expectations. Some times there's surprises, but more often then not, people don't have the time, money, or incentive to help in any way. High level R&D personnel have jobs already and can't contribute much of it to other projects. Then there's the retirees who usually enjoy coming back to work but nice and slowly as they are not being paid, and then there's the enthusiasts who can do some interesting things on their own but are ultimately unreliable. A global R&D is just unlikely to ever be what the makers hope. To get such a reliable force assembled, my suggestion is creating personal psychological profiles of each member and keeping them interested and informed by feeding them things they want to hear and giving the progress they want to see providing they are contributing enough to that extent. As for contribution, micromanagement for these contributors would be a must, and being world wide, would have to be the job of a program. And of course, mere interest may not suffice at keeping people going. That's when you need to think about incentives. Then of course this is global, so security would be none existent (which I would have to support fully) and then your developments need to be put into the real world which is done how? Sounds impossible, and for all intents and purposes for this project, it is. But hey, its 1 solution and its fairly accurate.

[Sam Fraser]

"LUNAR MISSION ONE: A new lunar mission for everyone"

Website:

http://www.lunarmissionone.com/

What is Lunar Mission One?

Lunar Mission One will send an unmanned robotic landing module to the South Pole of the Moon – an area unexplored by previous missions.

The mission will use pioneering technology to drill down to a depth of at least 20m – 10 times deeper than has ever been drilled before – and potentially as deep as 100m.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lu ... r-everyone

£404,505 pledged of £600,000 goal (as of Dec. 1 2014, "16 days to go")

YouTube:

[Sam Fraser]

[quote=""Sam Fraser""]
£404,505 pledged of £600,000 goal (as of Dec. 1 2014, "16 days to go")
[/quote]

Lunar Mission One got fully funded in the end:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lu ... escription

Another similar private lunar project is Moonspike which is currently running a Kickstarter campaign:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mo ... oon-rocket

£66,284 pledged of £600,000 goal (as of Oct. 15, 2015, "16 days to go")

I wish them the best of luck.

Veterans here may recall Shackleton Energy's early attempts at a crowdfunding campaign way back in the mists of time (2011):

Shackleton began a US$1.2 million seed stage funding round in November 2011, working with crowd funding partner RocketHub.[7][8] At the end of the fund raising period, only a total of $5,517 was raised out of the hoped-for $1.2 million (0.46%).[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shackleton_Energy_Company

It seems in 2015, seven-figure space-themed crowdfunding campaigns have a better chance, although I tend to think it's still a bit much at the outset.

And speaking of Shackleton, while Googling the latest info, I came across this:



https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/47 ... ton-crater

2013 interview with the game author here:

http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/15/410553 ... -interview

A pity this wasn't fully funded, it looked a lot of fun. And it seemed to me a more common-sense approach to start small with something like an online game or app that could generate revenue quickly and easily. (A commenter on the Kickstarter page suggests the initial goal of $700,000 may have been too high.)

[Rhyshaelkan]

Good read, thanks for posting Sam.