LifeShip Launchpad | Mission Updates, Vision, and More

What a time to be alive and be building for Earth and space.

Right now, dozens, even hundreds, of companies are building lunar landers, asteroid miners, space stations, and the infrastructure for a permanent human presence beyond Earth. Rovers are being assembled for the lunar south pole. Engines are being test-fired for missions to asteroids. Significant industry is starting to move off Earth, with major efforts underway to build AI infrastructure and power generation in space. Rockets are launching almost daily. The pace has shifted from "someday" to "now," and it's accelerating. Space is moving faster than most people realize, and so much is about to happen.

LifeShip exists at the heart of this movement. Not as a rocket company or a lander company, but as something different: a community-powered mission to steward life from Earth and continue the human story.

Read on for mission updates, our latest featured podcast, and a gathering you won't want to miss.

 🚀 Building Together — Mission Updates

Astrolab — Our Lunar Rover Mission

The Astrolab team has been on fire. Their FLIP rover, which will carry our next Luna Pyramid across the surface of the Moon, just completed its first drive in the cleanroom. That's a massive milestone. This is the rover that will physically drive our monument with seeds, DNA, art, and human culture across the lunar south pole.

You can see more of the rover and lander and catch a glimpse of the LifeShip Luna Pyramid in this video by Bremont.

The Luna Pyramid aboard FLIP is filled with art creations from our community, the Luna Gallery collective art project, the Moon Gallery book, a library of life with seeds and DNA from Earth's biodiversity, and much more. It will be our second community-powered monument of Earth on the Moon and our biggest monument yet.

Astrolab FLIP on it's first drive in the clean room. Check out the video.

AstroForge — Our Asteroid Mission

AstroForge is building DeepSpace-2, the spacecraft that will carry a LifeShip Pyramid to an asteroid, the first archive of Earth placed on another body in deep space. I love seeing the spacecraft come together:

• DeepSpace-2 has entered radio and communications testing in their new anechoic chamber, validating the spacecraft's ability to communicate across deep space.
• They successfully test-fired their propulsion system, verifying nominal performance across all parameters.

Images by AstroForge of radio and propulsion system testing. 

I'm an investor in AstroForge and a huge believer in their mission. Asteroid mining will reduce the environmental devastation of terrestrial mining and provide an abundance of the rare Earth metals needed for modern technologies. We are thrilled to have a LifeShip Pyramid make the journey, carrying an archive of art, culture, and technology to a rock orbiting the Sun.

What's Next

We're working towards something even bigger: our next monument to go to the Moon. It could be the most exciting space monument and Earth archive ever created. We're bringing together early partners to be part of the mission. If you or your organization want to include your vision, your project, your story, reach out. This is a hint of an exciting mission starting to come together, with more ways to participate coming soon. Let's build together.

🌍 The Library of Life — An Open Archive of Earth

At the core of everything we do is a simple and profound idea: we are building an open, collectively gathered record of humanity and life from Earth.

Think about what that means. A commons, gathered by thousands of people from around the world, preserved with billion-year technology, and placed on monuments across the solar system. Seeds from every continent. The DNA of Earth's species. Art, stories, music, ideas. The human genome itself.

This is a mission about stewardship. We are the generation that can look up at the Moon, at asteroids, at the vast expanse of space, and choose to place something there that says: Life was here. Life mattered. And we cared enough to continue it together.

LifeShip is an open movement. It belongs to everyone who believes that the story of Earth, of all its creatures, all its people, all its beauty, is worth safeguarding for the deep future. We're building a community space program for humanity, and every person who joins adds to the library.

This is a call to stewardship of life in the universe.

🌌 Star Vision — Imagining the Future We're Building

Moonshot Radio Season 1 Finale

I had the honor of being the Season 1 finale guest on Moonshot Radio, hosted by Linda Du. The episode was recorded in San Diego during the Artemis II mission, with the crew later landing just off the same coast. I loved our conversation about LifeShip's moonshot mission.

We talked about what it means to be stewards of life, building towards a legacy beyond our planet, building sanctuaries in space, and who humanity gets to choose to be as we become a multi-planetary species. It's a conversation close to my heart and one I think you'll enjoy.

🎧 Watch or Listen: Spotify · Apple · YouTube · Amazon

The Future Is Bright

I want to share a short film that captures something I feel deeply: 2100 — Beyond the Horizon. It's a vision of where humanity could be headed. Not collapse, but transformation. Cities integrated with nature. Clean energy at scale. Healthier humans. Life expanding outward.

We live in a time where the default narrative about the future is often dark. Dystopian stories dominate our screens. But I believe we can achieve a beautiful future. We are ushering in a new intelligence that can help discover scientific mysteries and solve our biggest challenges. We can discover and build technologies to care for Earth at unprecedented scales, feed and power all people, live sustainably with nature, travel cleaner and faster, and create with tools that were unimaginable a few years ago. Space access is opening up at an unprecedented pace. We are living longer and healthier than ever. We're developing the tools to mine asteroids instead of destroying ecosystems. Communities around the world are connecting around shared purpose.

The future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we build together. And the builders are here, right now, designing from home, working in cleanrooms and launch pads and labs and communities across our planet. It's the most exciting time in human history, one I'm excited to be part of, and thrilled to be raising a kid in.

And this is not just a dream for our children. This is the future each of us gets to create. The next generation of big rockets, capable of flying hundreds of people, are being test flown right now. Factories to build thousands of them a year are under construction. Going to space will become commonplace for many of us. Hundreds of companies are building towards a near-term city on the Moon. You will be able to go. This is the time we get to be alive! This is the time to be a creator and build towards your dreams.

Let's dream a future where humans become responsible stewards of life, live in harmony here on Earth, go on to populate new worlds in a beautiful way, and continue the human story to the stars. Let's hold that vision together and build towards it.

🌑 Join Us in Iceland — Total Solar Eclipse Gathering

August 11–15, 2026 · Iceland

On August 12, Iceland will experience a total solar eclipse for the first time in over 70 years. The Moon will completely block the Sun, turning day into night in one of the most stunning landscapes on the planet.

LifeShip is partnered with Iceland Eclipse, a five-day transformational gathering of music, art, science, and exploration happening during the eclipse. I'll be there with my daughter, Luna, speaking on stage and hosting events with our community. It's going to be unlike anything we've done before and I imagine one of the more powerful experiences of my life.
 

Imagine watching the sky go dark in the land of fire and ice, surrounded by a community of people who look up and dream of what's next. That's the kind of gathering that changes you.

Very limited tickets remain. There are only 3333 tickets and less than 10% are left. If you've been waiting for a sign, this is it.

👉 Get tickets at icelandeclipse.com and use the code LIFESHIP. 

✨ A Dream Worth Building Together

Imagine a great cathedral on the Moon. A monument to life from Earth, built by a global community. A library of Earth. A sanctuary and a destination. A place to visit and reflect on who we are and where we've come from.

Imagine looking out from inside a glass dome surrounded by living plants, across a lunar surface sprinkled with art and inspiration. Imagine watching Earth rise above the horizon, that blue marble hanging in the black sky, and feeling good about what humanity is doing in the universe and where we are headed.

Imagine being part of building that. Because you can be.

That future is what we are building together.

The stars are calling. Let's go.

Ad Astra ⭐
Ben Haldeman
Founder, LifeShip