LTV Background Story

On Feb 22, 2019 Israel attempted the first commercial mission to land on the Moon boosted by Space X's Falcon 9.  On April 11, 2019 the lunar lander dubbed Beresheet reached the Moon's orbit and navigated towards the Sea of Serenity (Mare Serenitatis).  Unfortunately, the spacecraft was lost just before expected landing and ended scattered over the rim of a small crater.

Beresheet delivered the first NanoFiche package to the moon surface.  The package was a joint effort by Bruce Ha from Stamper Technology and Nova Spivack from the Arch Mission Foundation.  The collection was quite comprehensive and was the first extensive body of human knowledge to be placed on the surface of the moon. 

This mission was not Nova's first mission into space.  Nova had negotiated with Elon Musk a year earlier to put a quartz storage device in the glovebox of a red Tesla Roadster launched as a demonstration of the Falcon Heavy's capability.

After seeing media coverage of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy stored in a quartz disc, Bruce contacted Nova and sent him a duplicate content on a 28mm analog version that would be much easier to decode for a future entity. Unlike the digital quartz disc, the Nanofiche was human readable under a microscope making the content much easier to decode.  A NanoFiche disc was also multiple times lighter and more affordable as a payload at the ongoing price of $1.2M/Kg.  Each NanoFiche disc weigh less than 0.5 grams, a practical data storage medium to serve as a space payload.  NanoFiche is made from pure elemental nickel and is immune from the severe exposure of radiation and extreme temperature variations in space or on the moon.

Bruce came from an optical storage background.  He started out in the aerospace industry with Raytheon and Hughes Aircraft working with missile systems and later joined Pioneer Video R&D on laser discs systems in Japan.  After having designed and implemented startups of several optical disc facilities, and represented Technicolor to standardize the DVD specifications, Bruce joined Kodak to develop their Picture CD program in Rochester, NY.  It is here that Bruce started his own company, Stamper Technology with his extensive experience and invented the NanoFiche format.

Bruce came to America as a refugee when he was young, so the memories he has of his home country, Vietnam, came from the albums his mother so thoughtfully took when they were fleeing the country.  Those albums were dropped in the ocean and the papers are now torn and images faded.  Bruce salvaged them by digitally scanning and storing them in the latest storage technologies.  But always, it was a battle with time and technology as storage technologies kept changing.  The photos and documents had to be continuously migrated.  First it was floppy discs, then zip discs, SuperDiscs, then CD's, Magnetic Optical Discs, DVD's, BlueRays.  Hard drives were used but failed often and the bus connection techs would change, SCSI, Ultra-SCSI, IDE, SATA.  Always migrating forward and usually not backwards compatible.

At Stamper Technology, Bruce was able to dedicate his time to develop an alternative storage technology to solve the constant technology changes and migration issues.  Bruce understood decoding digital, from any medium, was hard.  Binary information had to go through codecs, converted to channel coding with complicated error correction schemes, and deciphered into a format that is recognizable by the software (if it wasn’t obsolete).  Anyone know what a nap, pcx or tga format was? 

Bruce strongly believed in durable analog human readable storage solution if the information were to be migration and future proof. Recovery would require the least minimum technology to access.  Bruce invented the NanoFiche format that used a novel rotational writing system that is so precise, it can render images in cartesian format flawlessly at 300,000 dots per inch.  Images and documents alike can be engraved in nickel and recovered only by optics and light in a human readable format.  It has been tested to last for tens of thousands of years and is invariant to changing storage conditions.

Stamper Technology and the Arch Mission would go on to curate and create a second Lunar Library.  This time it contained data from the Aldrich foundation and had it landed, would mark the 50 year anniversary of Buzz Aldrin returning to the surface of the moon.  Unfortunately this package came back to Earth and ended up in the South Pacific ocean.

  

In 2020 Galactic Legacy Labs and Stamper Technology signed an exclusive service agreement to create a NanoFiche deck with human heritage and modern achievements to store on the moon.  Initially it was slated to be on Astrobotic's Peregrine flight, but the contract was switched to Intuitive Machines.  The content aimed for more of a commercial endeavor with paid content from artists, authors, poets, film makers, and other creative content makers.  After two years of content development, GLL opted to forgo exclusivity and Stamper Technology terminated the service contract. 

Stamper went on to create the NanoFiche deck adding its own curated content and delivered the package to Intuitive Machines on April 27th, 2023 in Houston by Fedex (tracking number 771971211252).  Stamper worked with IM on the integration with test mounts and NanoFiche samples in both facilities.  The package was mounted on the surface of the lunar lander Odysseus .

The NanoFiche Deck contained 16 layers.  The top layer is a 200 micron thick cover to protect the content from micrometeorites being mounted on the outside. Various sponsor logos were engraved with nano-diffractives to create dynamically shifting colors from the physical nano-structures.  25 million digits of pi were engraved in the background as a reveal to the intelligence inside the stack.  The 15 content bearing discs held two analog and two digital layers from GLL, three analog and two digital layers from the Arch Mission, and six analog layers from Stamper Technology.  Stamper Technology added some of the most consequential published work that shaped the world including writings from major religions, translations from cultural heritage foundations such as UNESCO, the Long Now codex for translating all major languages on Earth, and the Lunar Codex containing creative works from artists, authors, and poets from all over the world.

 

On February 15, 2024 from the Kennedy launch site, Space X Falcon 9 Block 5 carried IM's Odysseus along with the NanoFiche package to space. The spacecraft reached the moon on February 22, 2024 and made a successful soft landing at the Malpert A site at the Southern pole of the moon.  Odysseus tipped over during the landing, but fortunately the NanoFiche package was determined to be facing upwards in its final resting phase.

One day when our descendants walk among the stars, and NASA's Artemis program succeeds in creating a colony where Odysseus lies, the NanoFiche undoubtedly will be a historic treasure containing the first of many more time vaults using NanoFiche.