Fly Me to the Moon: Five Top Ways to Trade a Potential $170 Billion Lunar Economy

August 22, 2024 - Baystreet.ca


With growing interest in creating a lunar economy, NASA is exploring the moon for scientific discover, technological advancements, and learning how to live and work on another world. In fact, according to The Global Economics, The race to return humans to the Moon is still progressing with Europe, the US, and China spending billions already. But this time humans are not in for a short visit, but they are going to stay, with the purpose of doing long-term explorations” All of which could have a positive impact on companies such as VERSES AI Inc. (CBOE: VERS) (OTCQX: VRSSF), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Intuitive Machines (NASDAQ: LUNR), Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) and General Dynamics (NYSE: GD).

Even more impressive, “Experts at PwC estimate that the Lunar economy could be a $170 billion market in the next 20 years. But to reach there a proper infrastructure facility must be set up,” they added. “Most of the companies that join the plan are to offer the services of power and transportation. Other areas that came up after a close analysis were a proper market study, utilizing the lunar resources, and construction and robotics.”

One of the companies working with NASA is VERSES AI Inc. (CBOE: VERS) (OTCQX: VRSSF).

VERSES AI Inc., a cognitive computing company specializing in next generation intelligent systems, announces completion of a research collaboration with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which successfully demonstrated cross-platform interoperability between Digital Twin (DT) systems for lunar explorations. The project is part of a research phase of the Company’s GENIUS™ beta program.

Because of the difficulty of accessing objects in space, DT systems are critical for lunar exploration. DT enables engineers on Earth to manage the health of systems on the Moon and facilitates virtual planning and testing of lunar activities before robotic systems execute potentially dangerous tasks. Furthermore, lunar exploration is evolving into a collaborative international effort and DT has the potential to support testing across organizations globally.

The primary challenge to achieving this vision of collaborative lunar exploration is the interoperability between DT systems. In this project, the team from VERSES AI Inc., NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and California State University, Northridge (CSUN), demonstrated real-time joint testing of a lander model at CSUN and a rover DT model at JPL on distributed NVIDIA Omniverse platforms via standard-based spatial web protocols. Additionally, cross-platform collaborations between Omniverse and Unity platforms were demonstrated using these protocols. The team also showcased IP protection by executing a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) model remotely at JPL while testing the model at CSUN.

“We are thrilled to be working with JPL to help unlock the potential for multinational cooperation on the moon,” said Capm Petersen, Chief Innovation Officer, VERSES. “The Spatial Web standards, which GENIUS is the first developer toolkit to support, were designed to address the universal problem of transforming any data, not just geometry and geography, into a unified shared model including the rights and rules that govern the relationships between people, places, and things.”

VERSES, in partnership with the Spatial Web Foundation, worked with JPL researchers to model data using Spatial Web standards with the objective of allowing government agencies, private sector aerospace entities, and universities, each having different technology stacks, to collaborate in a unified real time simulation of the lunar surface.

“Coordination on the moon is a significant unsolved problem. Having developed mapping standards for Earth as the former Chief Technology Officer of the Open Geospatial Consortium, I’m excited to join forces with JPL on exploring how the Spatial Web standards could enable extraterrestrial interoperability,” said George Percivall, Vice-Chair of IEEE Spatial Web Standards Working Group.

The initial results of the collaboration were presented by Dr. Ed Chow, Manager, Civil Programs Office and Principal Investigator at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on July 18th & 19th at the Digital Twins for Cislunar and Lunar Surface Ecosystem Workshop at JPL in Pasadena, California. Attendees included scientists, researchers and experts from aerospace agencies and technologies companies working on digital twins and autonomous agents for lunar explorations.

PwC estimates that the Lunar economy could grow to a $170 billion market in the next 20 years.

VERSES Chief Commercial Officer, Michael Wadden, added, “As far as we know this marks the first demonstration of interoperability between distributed and disparate Digital Twin systems using the spatial web standard.”

Wadden will be presenting a keynote based on the work titled: “Digital Twin Interoperability for Lunar Exploration” at the Digital Twin Consortium third quarter meeting in Chicago, IL on September 12, 2024. Virtual and in person registration can be found here: https://www.digitaltwinconsortium.org/events/q3-2024-member-meeting/

Other related developments from around the markets include:

Nvidia announced major advancements to Universal Scene Description, or OpenUSD, that will expand adoption of the universal 3D data interchange framework to robotics, industrial design and engineering, and accelerate developers’ abilities to build highly accurate virtual worlds for the next evolution of AI. Through new OpenUSD-based generative AI and NVIDIA-accelerated development frameworks built on the NVIDIA Omniverse™ platform, more industries can now develop applications for visualizing industrial design and engineering projects, and for simulating environments to build the next wave of physical AI and robots. The new offerings include NVIDIA NIM™ microservices for AI models that can generate OpenUSD language to answer user queries, generate OpenUSD Python code, apply materials to 3D objects, and understand 3D space and physics to help accelerate digital twin development. In addition, new USD connectors to robotics and industrial simulation data formats and developer tools let users stream massive, fully NVIDIA RTX™ ray-traced datasets to Apple Vision Pro.

SEOPS, a leading provider of responsive space mission services and Intuitive Machines, Inc., a leading space exploration, infrastructure, and services company, announced today that they have entered into a launch services agreement. Under the agreement, Intuitive Machines will provide rideshare delivery services to SEOPS as it expands its offering beyond LEO to now include multiple destinations, from geostationary transfer orbit, to the Moon’s surface and various Lagrange points between the Earth and Moon starting after 2025. Intuitive Machines’ cadence of pioneering lunar exploration and scientific discovery missions, including its upcoming IM-2 and IM-3 missions, along with its capability to deliver commercial assets to orbit, enables commercial companies like SEOPS to provide deployment services. This establishes a new industry offering and expands SEOPS’ ability to provide integration, and deployment services to a wide range of orbital destinations.

Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics announced the signing of a strategic teaming agreement for the production of solid rocket motors that will bring security and resiliency to a vital domestic supply chain. “Maintaining a robust and diverse supply chain for solid rocket motors is critical to advancing our 21st Century Security® vision for a stronger, more resilient defense industrial base that keeps our customers around the globe ahead of emerging threats. This agreement enables Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics to ramp production of in-demand solutions more quickly going forward,” said Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.

Legal Disclaimer / Except for the historical information presented herein, matters discussed in this article contains forward-looking statements that are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such statements. Winning Media is not registered with any financial or securities regulatory authority and does not provide nor claims to provide investment advice or recommendations to readers of this release. For making specific investment decisions, readers should seek their own advice. Winning Media is only compensated for its services in the form of cash-based compensation. Pursuant to an agreement Winning Media has been paid three thousand five hundred dollars for advertising and marketing services for VERSES AI Inc. by VERSES AI Inc. We own ZERO shares of VERSES AI Inc. Please click here for disclaimer.

Contact:

Ty Hoffer
Winning Media
281.804.7972
[email protected]