J3 PAIN 04 Yalda Mousavinia A decentralized autonomous space agency, with Aragon at its core

hi there my name is yalda and i'm gonna be presenting a decentralized autonomous space agency with argon at its core I'm a co-founder of an organization called space cooperative but also we're creating a dhow called space T central so basically I've a little bit of background about me is I was a product manager and UX designer for about 10 years and prior to space II central I was a senior product manager at Oracle where I worked on their enterprise resource planning suite and I also have a Bachelors of Science and mechanical engineering from Berkeley and astronautical engineering certificate from UCLA so what is a decentralized autonomous Space Agency basically it's a decentralized because a single corporation our nation will not be responsible for its management its autonomous because member control because there'll be member control over how work is directed how decisions are made and which projects to fund and it's a space agency because the purpose is to strategically develop a space plan so we can action with meaningful impact this is not just a Kickstarter for space missions it's about really creating a roadmap that will be citizen led so right now what is space new Central right now it's a social network where you can join and find different missions to collaborate with people on the social networks not really on the blockchain yet it's just like reducing the barriers to entry the purpose is to build a community but basically how does Aragon fit into all this basically that will be our governance system that we will use whenever decisions are made for which projects to fund and like how work will be allocated but basically the goal is to do as many open-source space missions as possible if any of you are in aerospace industry you'll probably hear open-source aerospace and you're like well how can you do that with ITAR or export control regulations especially as US citizens well we think that there are a lot of things that you can still do in an open-source manner and we want the network we're gonna you know facilitate working on stuff that we know is easy to do online collaboratively um so yeah why why Aragon basically like the division of Aragon about how it's like you know building tools for the next generation of organizations to take advantage of this decentralized decision-making it's completely in line with space decentralize vision and like the whole purpose of open source is to not reinvent the wheel so why should we reinvent the wheel with creating a governance platform when one already exists where we can take advantage of that open source you know the open source work that's already been done and since they've built it as an operating system we can start to build the applications on top of their system that are missing that would like meet the needs of our organization so like I said before my background was in enterprise resource planning and basically to have like a space agency on the box chain you are gonna need a very complex ERP suite like Douw enterprise software so that's that's the roadmap that we see for Aragon not just a tool to like fund different things with like decision making but actually like how are we gonna plan work for our enterprise as a dhow so at the base of Aragon OS is the access control list and this basically determines you know the different roles in the organization and you know what authorizations or permissions that people have for you know whether it's using different features and application the different types of votes you might want to do how upgrades may occur and this is very important when building a Space Agency because there are gonna be a lot of different you know actors in the ecosystem and you're gonna want to restrict the the decision-making for different types of people it's not it's not about building like a hierarchical organization but it's just like you know someone that's an expert on Mars might not necessarily be an expert on the moon so you know you can have the the permissions designed in such a way that you know people that are working on Mars they can you know work and vote on the Mars missions people that are working on the moon can vote and work on the moon missions so how how is the ecosystem gonna work basically it's also the other unique aspect about Spacey central it's a two token ecosystem so one token is FTL or faster-than-light and the other one is the space D central network token and basically they represent different different things so we thought it would be important to like break it apart so the space D central network token that is a token that only people can earn by completing tasks it cannot be purchased unless someone decides to sell it on a decentralized exchange individually but it's like Spacey central will never be selling Sdn tokens these will be you know kind of staked against tasks kind of like with a bounty system and as people complete tasks they can earn it so if a lot of you've heard about like colony and how they have like you know tokens against tasks that you can earn this is similar to like that kind of mechanics but it is a RC 20 that will have very special things programmed into it basically if the network generates revenue you're the percentage of SDN that you hold will determine your your reward share so if you like see the little graph there then other token is the faster-than-light token and this can be purchased and this basically gives people influence over the higher-level development of the space program so basically if you think of like range voting where you might have a hundred FTL and you say okay I want 28.6% to go towards Earth 23% to go to Mars 47% to go to the moon so as in as a token holder um you can divide up your vote for the space programs based on how many FTL you hold I'm gonna go through an example for that later so within the ecosystem there are different stakeholders one you have the members and they are the primary governing body of the ecosystem so it's not everything a token weighted FTL vote a lot of it is a member vote and on the next is the council this might be something but we don't start off with but you'll see as the network grows the members might find it important to create a council because whenever you're selecting space missions they are going to be you know 100-page proposals or so and not everyone is gonna have the time or the knowledge to read through a proposal and understand the engineering and to be able to say well that actually is a valid design for a lunar rover so at least the council will kind of be this backup entity to make sure that we will be able to vet missions you know with the correct engineering correct technical skills and maybe even monetization you know business type of vetting as well and you have project teams so within the network there are gonna be um let's see there gonna be an RFP process which is a request for proposals process and that is how we imagine if there are a lot of different competing competing ideas within the ecosystem people will have to submit proposals to the different RFPs and then there will be have to be a vetting process to determine which project gets added to the space plan essentially so project team like that gonna just be really anyone you don't have to be a member but you can just be a contributor you don't have to have any tokens to form a project team but you can start to win tokens if you submit a proposal into the ecosystem and it gets adopted angels that's just a term that we're using to to use for the the financial contributors of the ecosystem they're not necessarily you know making the day-to-day like member just decision making they're not necessarily on the project team there there are the people that you know might want to purchase a lot of FTL to influence the work of the network so if for example like Elon Musk thought oh this is a great way to develop open-source ideas for Mars he could buy a lot of FTL and just like have his vote so the network is working on Mars so so it could be people that you know have an interest on the the labor of the network they really want to have like more you know open-source or more science done for a specific type of program and that's why they might want to you know contribute more financially to the ecosystem and then you would have affiliates and there are different things that the network is doing it can be you know developing software whether it's like software to make an aerospace organization more efficient you might want to even like start to host that as like a software-as-a-service might be producing media but affiliates are kind of like not exactly governing members but people that are utilizing the services of the network so like I said before it Aragon will be at the core of a lot of the different decision-making for like the members and the council especially and then the angels for the program level FTL votes so where we will what likely have to like make some enhancements or tweaks or modules to have the voting work for our organization so I'm gonna explain more about how the angel voting shares work so basically the other thing to take into consideration whenever we're building this network is you don't want people to just kind of like purchase FTL vote for the space program and then sell it the next day because they're just like trying to mess with your space program they're like let's just put everything on Pluto you know we don't we don't want people to that don't really have a stake in the ecosystem to just mess with a space program so if you want to do the program level FTL vote you're gonna have to this is the current design this can totally change but you're enough to lock your FTL for one year or you're gonna have to hold it for one year and basically your voting power will also start to vest beyond that up to five years and it will vest every quarter so if you have it locked for one year and three months then your voting power becomes 1.25 so each quarter your voting power increases up until 5x so up until 5 years so this is a way to kind of like if you're if you get in early and like just like lock in a few tokens and after a few years your voting power for the space program can increase so for example let's say that the FTL holders are trying to decide between Earth Mars or the moon and they do some range voting and you see like for example Patrick and the third row he just wants all in on the moon and then Susie and the top row she wants like a third of each and then after that you you kind of come up with your space program and this this essentially determines how many Sdn tokens that the network mints for the labor essentially so based on the FTL vote now we know how the labor of the network should be directed so this is a flow diagram of like the RFP process the request for proposals that gets sent out there are different project teams there are also peer reviewers within the network they help you know provide their reports on if the solutions are viable or not and then you have like the council that can ultimately review all of the the work that the peer reviewers have done and then select or say this is what we think are that should be the recommended solution so there can still be governing processes after that where even if the council recommends this is the best solution there can you know be deliberation if a lot of people you know might disagree for some reason so it's not nothing is fully locked in so the different voting privileges basically this describes a member and council so the members would be able to determine the project ideas develop into RFPs determining the amount of tokens to allocate to the rfp's you know even though you might have 30% moon within the moon you would have different RFPs like we want a rover for the moon we want a GPS constellation for the moon so you decide after you have the budget how much you want to slice and dice into the different proposals so how do you get a member voting share this is based on the SDN that you collect in the network so all the tasks they'll have Sdn staked against them the full time you know core team of a Spacey central network will also be doing their work you know collecting these same points and that determines like the baseline for the hundredth percentile so so that's how you get like for voting shares so you use that as a benchmark to see how much everyone else is contributing and if there are people like that are outside of the core team that are contributing just as much they also get for voting shares so this is kind of like like think of like for voting shares like the full amount of shares you can get and this is like somewhat civil resistant because it's like based on human labor you know how much a person is putting into the system I know we have to think about Oh what if someone just outsources a lot of people to complete a lot of tasks for the space program well it's like okay if someone really wants to do that they're they're managing a workforce I guess but this is also stuff that's like up for a debate and we're gonna be working through it so the other part of the ecosystem like there's a competitive RFP process but there will also be an open source process especially after you select a winning solution the the solution is really like a project plan so that project plan needs to be broken out into tasks and then you have to start allocating tokens against those tasks so there will be you know like a consensus type of planning poker tool that we will build on top of Eragon that you can use to do like bulk bounties in a in a collective manner as opposed to just one person saying this is what the bounty should be so this is a we submitted a proposal for a next grant for Eragon to build a planning app within there and this shows a little mock-up of how you might want to integrate it with github to begin with and you can start to potentially do like range voting curation type of you know curation type of market for whether it's issues or projects so these are some things that we're gonna start to experiment with um so this is a an idea for how you might want to evaluate like how many sdn a task is worth as a dao you would say our minimum wages whatever 20 euros an hour our maximum wage is 60 euros an hour you know so that's how you would get like the the skill level table right there so you agree on like what your minimum and maximum wages and then you come up with what you're like you know multipliers would be for priority and then whenever you're estimating how long a task will take this computes the amount of SDN that that task would have and then you know you you still need to do quality assurance so there would have to be some kind of reviewers within the ecosystem that are then rating the work and then you know if it was rejected then no the person doesn't earn the SDN but if they if it got accepted then they do earn it potentially more than it was originally worth you can also add bonuses to potentially and then um yeah so then now I don't talk about finance before because before I was giving like different examples of what can be some revenue sources okay well this can be a network that you know you're a space agency but you might want to just create a sci-fi franchise to to help fund it so that can be one project if you're planning a mission to the moon and you're like let's like mine some helium-3 you could sell come out commodity futures space operations you can like charge people tokens to operate a rover you could pre sell tickets to the moon like I said before software as a service consulting services people outside of the network that aren't members submitting proposals you know charging a small fee for that so these can be like the different revenue sources and what you can also decide as a dao is okay well based on that revenue how much should we send to the different accounts so you would have like for example one account for the rewards engine that's where you're distributing it back to the the workers based on how much Sdn they hold you know you want to ensure that you can keep sending out like bounties for proposals or open source projects so you want to budget some amount for that and then budget some amount for actually funding the projects themselves because funding a proposal is one thing that the project is is another thing growing the core team the the the goal will be to grow the core team from the workers of the DAO so it's not just like you know we're co-founders we're gonna hire all the people like we're gonna have a hiring process work within the DAO so you decide how does someone become part of the core team and then like land facilities and equipment if you want to start to kind of purchase spaceport like an island to start to build a space elevator you know you can start to figure out how how should we budget for that so yeah aragón finance we hope to be using this to to plan all of the different accounts and and then have the governance in place for how you know how should those values would be updated like maybe as a Dow we will update our budget percentages on a yearly basis so different things like that that you would have to set in motion so yeah this is just a little like the end of the presentation and all the thought experiment if a hundred million people just contributed $16 a month we would have the same budget as Nass like it's like there's nothing stopping us from creating a citizen-led Space Agency it's just it's really up to us and now like with the blockchain with the transparency with these processes it's like the technology is finally at a state where we can do this and we can't and you can like be a part of it you don't have to ask for permission to be part of the space agency you don't to be a citizen of a nation you're you don't have to have a SpaceX like in your country it's like we can we can do it together so that is the closing thought is like yeah let's build a Space Agency and then yeah so right now you can join space T central dot net and literally people are planning a mission to the moon right now so we have like you know former retired NASA people like already doing a CONOPS for that and you know we haven't we haven't decided yet what the first mission is so we're just like seeing what ideas are popping up and you know they're coming along yeah any questions there any ways to change the system itself like for example if we wanted to change the number of tokens or how power effects and changes in the system yeah so basically both of the tokens they are not fixed supplies so the network can decide to mint more FTL tokens especially if you want to use that as a way to fund the different space missions other things that might happen is you might just want to you know as a network you might come up with an idea and you're like that might just require its own IC o---- so so there's nothing that's like fully restricted that oh every every mission that that is proposed here needs to be funded by this FTL or it needs to be funded by this token like it's really meant to be really really open and see how it evolves to see like what business models you might like need for those different tokens but yeah Sdn that's you know minted they're both minted by the organization but you want to probably limit the inflation rate for you know what would happen with how many more FTL tokens you can mint every year but there wouldn't nope it there would be no no fixed supply for either of them right now I just a practical question say I'm working actually on a Pluto mission and I'm working on the suspension system for the Pluto Rover and I designed it I manufactured where the hell do I deliver it to to the internet so you're talking I just designed yes I worked on a mission I'm working on a mission and I designed it and I I have the actual hardware who's responsible for receiving the actual hardware who's gonna put it together at the end of the day um it's very unlikely that you would just work on the hardware in your garage for a space mission I mean it would likely go through a bidding process where before you say we're gonna use your system for our Pluto mission you know as a you become a contractor of the organization because there might be a lot of people that would be you know competing for it as well so I mean there can be people that are just like maybe you're licensing your hardware or you're you know it's completely designed from the ground up from the system but but basically it's like typically wherever you send the spacecraft is wherever you're launching it from so for launching it from Florida then you know you would send it there so it really matters like what the ultimate like launch site is which there is there are no restrictions for where that would be they aren't but anyway regarding the Sdn distributions what's my incentive of doing a job if I know that there's a likelihood there's a certain probability of my work being rejected so I spend a lot of time doing some work and some committee decides that actually this is not good enough and I'm gonna it's gonna be rejected well the ideally it's not ten people competing to complete the the main task it's like you select one person so we want that to also be more automated so you know as you're gaining like reputation within the system it'll start to match the right people to the right tasks yeah so how do we balance the budget of the long-term program due to the short-term evaluation of the token yeah so basically the the way that the network will start it's not that we are gonna be funding a full space mission but it's more like we need to get our infrastructure in place to operate as a space dau and then like I said the funding of those missions there's there's nothing there's nothing that's restricting it that it has to you know we have to sell it sell eath and hold the eath if the organization's like yeah we can raise it in eath but if they feel more secure to sell it to Fiat and hold it an or die you know you can use die I think that would probably be the the more ideal scenario as opposed to like you know being concerned about the volatility and using like US dollars so yeah we think die would work very well in the ecosystem so my question is that how how and when do you abort things that like with with space exploration one of the recurring challenges is that the risks many risks are unforeseeable and costs are unforeseeable and of course things start not to go according to plan and at some point you need to make a liquidation decision whether or not you continue with that were you just salvage whatever you have and you know use your resources for something else so how these kind of heavy decisions are going to be made and how do you avoid like Suncoast bias and C's and things like that and how do i how do we avoid while X and cost biases like you have ports so many resources and this let's just continue because we just need a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more and you keep pouring resources into something that will ultimately fail so how do you make these decisions that okay this needs to be aborted because it's not delivering according to plan whereas like most things will probably not match the plant penny for penny because it's impossible it's high-risk game but like how do you define those yeah I mean I think that's just like a standard project management thing that not necessarily this system is gonna solve but it's about putting together the team that can work through those decisions but that's nothing like it's not rocket science like figuring like figuring out project management if you want to keep going if you want to add more budget to it so it really it's really like up to the the organization where we said oh previously we had this budget do we want to give more of a budget to that and it's it's gonna be about figuring out yeah who is in control to really do that um you know supply that additional funding which it might just have to come from the network of users you know so it's like if the users are gonna fund it or if the users are managing the same budget then they're the ones that are going to make that decision for if they think it's viable to keep going on another question okay thank you [Applause]