B612 Foundation Receives New Funding and Strategic Support From Prominent Leaders in Business, Entertainment, Science and Technology
“The world’s first privately funded deep space mission – SENTINEL – received major support this week from prominent members of the business and financial community who joined the B612 Foundation’s Founding Circle. In June, the B612 Foundation unveiled its plans to build, launch, and operate the first privately funded deep space mission, a space telescope to be placed in orbit around the Sun, up to 170 million miles from Earth, for a mission of asteroid discovery and mapping. This premier scientific instrument not only will provide millions of asteroid discoveries, but also help us prevent a major asteroid impact on Earth. Sentinel will detect and track asteroids accurately enough to give decades of warning of impending impacts to allow humanity to easily deflect threatening asteroids using existing technology.”

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8 replies on “B612 Raises Capital For First Privately Funded Deep Space Mission”

  2. That’s great, I hope they’re successful.  However, I’m disappointed the press release didn’t give any numbers — specifically how much they’ve raised and how much they need to launch their telescope.  Without those numbers, it’s impossible to know how optimistic to be about this organization.

    1. I’m disappointed the press release didn’t give any numbers.
      Not always a wise idea to do so here, with big donors.

      Doesn’t work like a bake sale.

      1. There are plenty of organizations with big donors and high fundraising goals that are transparent about how much they are trying to raise and how much they have raised.

        For example, I regularly get asked to give money to Stanford University, because I’m an alumn.  Stanford is a private organization trying to raise money, just like B612.  But with Stanford I can go to their web site and see that, for example, in the 2011 fiscal year they raised $709.4 million from 77,524 donors.  I can also see that so far this year The Stanford Fund, one particular fundraising push, has raised $274,994 from 423 donors from the class of 1990.

        http://facts.stanford.edu/f…
        http://giving.stanford.edu/…

        That’s not exactly a bake sale.

        These kinds of aggregate statistics do not violate the privacy of individual donors.

        I don’t see any reason to make a big press release about raising a bunch of money and then not say how much was raised, unless they are trying to hide the fact that they haven’t really raised a significant fraction of the money they need.

        1. No, not like an institution either.

          But, even at Stanford, they don’t announce building commitments until its a done deal.

          Not to be condescending, but you don’t know how this kind of thing works. The kind of thing like this works by getting several big money types comfortable with parking large sums next to equal or larger sums – they are terrifically worried about fundraising backfires. So it makes sense.

          They don’t care about incremental publicity, just the total value of the end deal.

          With bake sales, the idea is more attracts more.

          With these, not the right kind (or sum, or “affinity”) means no dollars at all. Thus no talk til it comes together.

        2. SENTINEL is a wonderful idea, and I wish B612 loads of luck in it. But let’s face it, as you say, if they’re not telling us how much they’ve raised, we’re probably looking at enough to keep a few part-time engineers gainfully employed for a year or so.

          Now, that in itself is an important accomplishment, and can well be termed “major support”. It will go a long way towards coming up with a credible design concept, and keeping the idea alive, but it would be a factor of a thousand less than what they need to actually pull the whole job off.

          Rich folks like to buy connections to cool stuff. It might never happen, but it doesn’t cost a lot to have their name linked with that cool stuff.

  4. The amounts “raised” would be interesting, but then we’d also need the terms under which these investments were made.  If there is a caveat along the lines of, if such and such is not accomplished/demonstrated with a certain time period then an investor has the the option of withdrawing his/her portion of the funding (or the pro rata amount of funds remaining), then it could all fall apart as quickly as it appears to have come together.  Assuming that their goals are actually as stated, the important thing, to me, is that they’re trying to do this thing at all.  I am encouraged by the number of non-government, first-time activities and proposals we’ve seen pertaining to space in the last few years, of which this is just one example.  If they should succeed, then it’s just a matter of time before they find a way to start making money, or even a profit, from this.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve already worked that part out.  I may be forced to eat my previous words if undertakings like this succeed in creating a non-government, money-making space exploration and development industry without government financial support and work contacts.  I would be most delighted to be wrong.

    Steve

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