Greetings CrowdExplorers,

I am so happy to announce that earlier tonight we reached our Kickstarter goal!! Thank you to Sacha Greer who purchased a crewmember seat for MDRS Crew 197 this October!

The Expanse gets saved and MarsVR reaches its goal in the same weekend! Amazing! Now the serious planning work begins, and we are already making plans to send our team out to the MDRS next month to start the photogrammetry scans. It’s going to be a busy summer for us!

Now we are announcing our stretch goals for the Kickstarter. Let’s keep pushing and ensure that our Phase 1 environment is the best it can be!

If we raise $35,000, we will increase the amount of terrain we will have in the Phase 1 environment by 25%. That means instead of one (1) square mile, it will be 1.25 square miles. We will also include an additional crewmember training scenario (likely growing plants in the Greenhab). Finally, we will send a large round sticker of our Mission Seal to ALL BACKERS. This would be a great sticker to apply to a car, or laptop.

If we raise $45,000, our terrain coverage will go up to 150% of the planned amount — so one and a half square miles — this will allow us to do an additional 2-3 EVA sites at a minimum! We’ll also include two (2) additional mission scenarios including repairing a space suit inside the RAM module, which is a highly technical process that we have talked about, but that we were hesitant to commit to building in VR. But if we raise $45k, we will figure it out one way or another! Also, if we reach this level we will provide some additional rewards to ALL BACKERS! This will include a special online workshop event where we debut the beta environment and help train everybody on how to set things up, as well as a special training area of our website to include more documentation and materials on how to learn about MarsVR, Unity, and VR in general.

Now that we are a successful Kickstarter, let’s keep up the momentum! Tell all of your friends and colleagues about our project and please pledge generously!

Thanks,

James Burk

Program Manager, MarsVR