Micah Johnson’s NFT artwork depicts a young Black astronaut orbiting the Earth via the International Space Station. It will be sold off for a good cause.Johnson’s NFTs owners can assist in the development of the property, which includes a forthcoming feature picture based on the character. Micah Johnson, a former Major League Baseball player, created Aku in answer to his four-year-old nephew’s question to his mother, “Can astronauts be Black?”
Since his first appearance in NFT artwork in February, the character has struck a chord with fans and collectors. In an interview with Decrypt, Johnson said, “It’s a sort of representation that I think is appetising for kids to be able to grasp what’s possible in space, science, and beyond that.”
Aku has recently ventured into new territory: his artwork was sent to a server on the International Space Station (ISS), orbited the Earth, and then returned home.
The single-edition sculpture will go on sale next Tuesday, August 10, via NFT marketplace Notables, and is billed as the first piece of NFT artwork to journey to space. The process was done in conjunction with Artemis Music and Nanorocks, the latter of which controls the Bishop Airlock, the International Space Station’s first privately-owned commercial infrastructure.
According to Artemis Music, the video source file for the new Aku NFT was blasted to the ISS server on July 28 from Nanoracks mission control in Houston, Texas. As the station orbited the Earth, the file remained on the server before being returned to the earth just under two hours later. To authenticate the procedure, telemetry and transmission data were kept and are now part of the NFT’s smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain.
In a release, Artemis Music Entertainment co-founder Bob Richards said, “Aku became the first NFT artwork to be sent to the International Space Station and orbit the Earth on July 28th, 2021.” “Our Artemis Space Network test, which we did in conjunction with Nanoracks, was a world first in terms of commercial space access, paving the way for a new age of music and entertainment sector communication to space.”
An NFT is a digital asset’s deed of ownership, whether it’s a video file, still artwork, video game item, or music recording. A tokenized audio of composer Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” was transported to the ISS alongside the forthcoming Aku NFT, making it the first music NFT to go to space and back. That NFT could be sold off later.
