Spacepedia

• 

  Destinations

• 

  Providers

• 

  Payment

Inspiration

In the wake of burgeoning interest and investment in outer space explorations, we found ourselves captivated by the notion of space tourism. We envisaged a world where the ordinary individual can tour the cosmos just as easily as booking a ticket to Paris. As space tourism becomes increasingly viable, we wanted to create a visual narrative that will help to bring the future of space tourism to everyday people today.

What it does

Our website is like an "Expedia" for space travel, and is a meticulously designed interface that estimates the expense of touring various celestial bodies within the next 200 years. Whether you aim to soak in the serenity of the Moon, explore the rugged terrain of Mars, or indulge in the beauty of the lower Earth orbit, we let you book a space flight on multiple providers.

Once you want to book your flight through one of the providers, you can pay with card or crypto. We also included ads on the website where the typography is based off of aerospace ads to replicate the experience of actually booking a space flight on an ad-supported platform.

How we built it

We built a react website that helps to visualize the cost of going to space for everyday people and how far you could be going with the money you have today.

To calculate costs, we created a forecasting algorithm that uses historical and current space launch prices as well as estimates for the next generation space launch vehicles provided by industry experts. Given the decay of price over time, we projected a roughly order of magnitude decrease in cost across various launches over the next 200 years assuming current market growth. All numbers are in 2022 USD.

For test payments, we used Flow for paying in crypto and getting an NFT ticket though we weren't able to finish that it time. We still have the flow NFT minting contracts and tests in the backend though. We also included test credit card payments using Circle using my Circle developer account.

All providers are fictional but represent existing and predicted players in the aerospace industry.

What we learnt

We gained a deep understanding of projecting future prices for nacent industries like Space tourism. We also learned how to make contracts on Flow and test them on the stimulator.

What challenges did you face

Setting up payments was a huge challenge for us, even as a demo. We were able to set up Flow payments on the backend and make API calls to Circle for card payments, but still ran into a few errors.

Built With

• react