Parabolic Arc
All Space All the Time
By David Bullock
Staff Writer
What happens when you get a fashion icon and combine his passion for space? You get the year-old company SpaceOne Industries started by Nick Graham, former CEO of Joe Boxer and a designer to astronauts such as Buzz Aldrin.
“I’ve always collaborated a lot at NASA. I started SpaceOne and kind of put all these ideas under one roof,” said Nick Graham, CEO of SpaceOne. “I know a lot about how to make stuff and design stuff. The efficiencies of what we can do are technologically pretty good. We could source anything from around the world, The design and graphics are pretty much drawn by me. So, we’re lean and mean and efficient.“
SpaceOne is producing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to be shared by space aficionados, creating fashion for both the metaverse and the real world, and linking it all to augmented reality opportunities. Graham has taken the company into the world of NFTs, which are are unique cryptographic tokens that exist on a blockchain and cannot be replicated.
SpaceOne’s MetaMission One (MM1) minted NFTs from the International Space Station (ISS) in April. A portion of the proceeds went to benefit The Planetary Society, a member-supported non-profit that promotes space exploration headed by Bill Nye the Science Guy.
“NFTs are exploding because it is a one-of-one explosion of digital art that otherwise could not have been claimed before. There are no experts in this industry. One of the great things about NFTs is that you can create a community of people all interested in the same thing. The idea about MetaMission One is to create opportunities in the metaverse,” Graham said.
“[NFTs] only exist once, before with digital art you couldn’t do that. We been doing that with digitized music forever and we found a way to monetize it,” he added. “But it’s been only recently that we’ve been able to find a way have digital art to be monetize, which has created a market that is much more dynamic that the so-called fine art market within about a year.”
While an NFT could appreciate in value and also be bought and sold several times, Graham’s goal is primarily to create community and keep people interested in space.
“That’s why I love having The Planetary Society involved. They are looking for new members, so this is a way for them to tap into a new demographic,” he added.
SpaceOne industries is a privately held company of twelve employees and has a presence around the world.
Graham has always been excited about space and has lots of experience, but he is also always looking toward the future.
“I love the vision of space and I love the technologies,” he said. “I like the dynamic that is happening in space in the way its transformed from a government funded platform to a dramatic commercialization of the industry now in terms of space tourism and building space industries across planets… Every kind of modern form of transportation is what we kind of look at to design for, at SpaceOne. The brand is fashion and technology.”
Graham noted that the more we look to space as a future, resource utilization on Earth and amongst the stars is also important to factor.
“All the fashion and products we make are recycled and can be recycled again. So wherever we take to wherever we go needs to be extremely efficient to be melted down and made into something new. So there are a lot of combinations of taking my background and applying it to the future,” he explained.
“The biggest challenge of the space industry in the next five years,” said Graham, “is to have a workforce that is going to sustain it. If we are going to support this industry we need people and engineers and early stage programming for young people. [For the future of space] all the hardware will be in place, but when you get to the ‘software,’ which is my world, which is not only how it looks, but how it works to make it better and how we can make it more environmentally efficient. Going into that is how SpaceOne is going to go.”
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