There was a lot of disappointment among staffers at a Rochester high-tech company after an Israeli unmanned spacecraft crash-landed on the moon Thursday.
The local company is called Stamper Technology, and staffers there spent months putting together what is essentially a sophisticated time capsule, that was on board the small spacecraft built by a private organization from Israel.
Stamper’s founder and president, Bruce Ha, says his company’s contribution was providing technology for a library with an immense amount of data…30 million pages of information including a full version of Wikipedia and a digital library of human languages.
And after several months of development, they learned on Thursday that the spacecraft crash-landed on the moon.
“We spent lots of sleepless nights trying to get it on time. There was a deadline we had to really make, and when that didn’t make it, it’s like a sail, just completely deflated, so we were very disappointed. But now as we start to understand what’s going on, we look forward to version 2,” Ha explained.
Ha said that the fact his company has already done a lot of the foundation work on their product, it won’t take as long to recreate when someone else is willing to carry it into space.
Stamper Technology is working with other organizations in an effort to help preserve information about humanity, by sending it to various locations outside of Earth.
“We actually have several other missions we’re going to be on, so we’re undeterred, we’ll get a library on the moon, we will, that’s our mission….and we will do that,” Stamper said.
Copyright 2019 WXXI News
