Kickstarted

It all started when I read an article on BBC Online in June last year about a director who was looking to crowd funding website Kickstarter to try to fund his film, Elstree 1976. The documentary interviews and follows the fortunes of some of the minor characters behind the masks of Star Wars. Since then I've helped fund 8 projects covering a number of different categories. For those of you not familiar with the site, essentially people ask for members of the public to fund their projects and in return are given rewards.

One of the projects that caught my eye was Lunar Mission One, a future mission to the unexplored South Pole of the moon. As part of this mission a public and private archive is to be buried beneath the surface.  As well as this rather fetching and exclusive patch, as a reward for funding the project I received space in the capsule. No idea what I'm going to use it for since final allocations have to be determined but it's just one of these silly once in a lifetime things that tickled my fancy. In addition to creating and proving the technology to make the mission work, there's a whole scientific and educational programme being developed for the project. If you want to learn more or even buy your own space in the capsule you can visit the website here.


Something else that has driven me to back some projects is just an interest in the subject matter. One project that is nearing completion is a biographical account of Nakahama Manjiru, the first Japanese man to live in America.  Nope, I'd never heard of him before either, but his life sounds interesting enough to me to learn more.  With 9 days to go, it's still a little short so I'm going to give it a wee plug here just on the off chance that someone might be interested.