You won’t be seeing anything like this on the cover of Amazing Stories –
Earlier this week, Planetary Resources, the space mining company, announced that it had cancelled one of its crowd-funded projects and was offering refunds to everyone who contributed.
Space enthusiasts are not happy, as many have expressed dissatisfaction with Planetary Resources lack of communication and with the company’s planned refund methods. One commentator noted that Planetary Resources has been holding onto the crowd sourced donations for more than three years, and asked if they would be receiving a percentage of the interest earned on those funds…
Unknown to most, Amazing Stories was a participant in the Arkyd Space Telescope Kickstarter project, the aim of which was to put a small telescope into orbit (to be used to search for minable asteroids) and attach a “selfie-camera” to it; funding participants were to be given the right to submit an image that would be placed on a screen on the telescope, and receiving a “space selfie” in return for their contribution.
The amount required was minimal, but the reward was an excellent one – especially for a science fiction magazine.
Seriously, what says “space”, “the future” and “the untold benefits of technology in the future” better than a picture of yourself (or, in our case, the cover of one of our issues, or a title and a group pic of our contributors) in space?
We’ve declined the refund on principal; the offered reward’s value is FAR in excess of what was paid for it.
Kickstarter is being asked to look into this, but has so far declined to take any action.
Below, the relevant portion of the refund announcement email, and a screen capture of the refund page itself (note the release that is included).
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We here are very, very disappointed; going into space has been a lifelong dream that age (and politics) has slowly diminished; the space selfie was one small way of realizing that dream, which itself has now been trampled on.
Time to re-read Heinlein’s Requiem.
