DOGE-1, the starting time crypto-funded mission to the moon, is gear up to launch early next year following a new partnership between two blockchain companies and manufacturer Geometric Energy Corporation, also known as GEC.

Smart commutation ecosystem Unizen and decentralized finance incubator ZenX appear Wednesday that they are in the process of building and launching DOGE-1, a 40-kilogram — roughly 88 pounds — CubeSat that will provide a new use instance for cryptocurrencies. The CubeSat will travel to a "stable lunar orbit" in lodge to obtain lunar-spatial intelligence from sensors and cameras that will be sent dorsum to GEC for analysis.

The CubeSat volition be deployed through a launch agreement with SpaceX FalconX slated for the first quarter of 2022, though no difficult dates were provided. Over 1,600 CubeSats have been launched to date, but different DOGE-ane, they've traveled into Low Earth Orbit, which is between 100 and 1,200 miles to a higher place the Earth'south surface. Traveling to lunar orbit puts DOGE-ane 250,000 miles away from Earth.

"NASA'due south CAPSTONE was set to be the start cubesat to achieve the moon, but it has been delayed a number of times and has a current launch date of late March 2022," the companies said. "This ways that DOGE-1 could be the first cubesat in history to reach the moon, marker a significant achievement for global spaceflight."

As Cointelegraph previously reported, the Dogecoin-funded project was beginning introduced in May of this year, with a planned launch date as early as the first quarter of 2022. At the fourth dimension, SpaceX vice president of commercial sales Tom Ochinero said the "mission will demonstrate the application of cryptocurrency across Earth orbit and set the foundation for interplanetary commerce."

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Dogecoin (DOGE) rose to prominence earlier this year cheers in part to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who touted the memecoin's virtues and even claimed to work with its developers to improve its efficiency. The Musk-inspired surge may take added billions to DOGE'due south market capitalization at a time when more mainstream users were getting into cryptocurrency.