Looking Ahead
RedMapper isn't just a book or web map, it’s raw data. With the current generation of the Mars and Moon portals, you can zoom in and explore in greater detail than you can in the atlases. An Atlas is a great gift, coffee table curio, and honestly a great reference to have in hand. However, the future of RedMapper is in the data itself.
Concurrently with the atlases and portals, we are working on additional tools that will allow anyone to use the data for their own purposes. Imagine a virtual reality Mars colonization game where you can drop a pin on the Martian globe and BOOM, there you are. Or imagine you’re looking for a place to plan your space colony and need to perform a slope analysis, using such data you’ll be able to remotely immerse yourself in that world to better understand its environmental constraints.
Eian has a background in GIS and data management. Tyler has a background in scuba diving and adventure photography. These may seem like diverse backgrounds but they all revolve around one thing, exploration. In the course of time, we've realized that The Mars Atlas consistently impresses people whenever it's put in front of them. Not only because of what it is but because of what it represents. It represents a window into another world, a portal allowing anyone to explore at their own leisure. It inspires imagination, and that’s powerful.
When we began RedMapper, we didn't have the funds to just bankroll a new project. We scraped together some money from our day jobs to buy a server, a couple of pieces of software, in order to process the data we acquired from NASA. Although we were able to get off the ground without a hitch, we didn't have the $10,000 or so we needed for an initial print run of the atlas. Even if we printed 500 copies how would we get them into the hands of interested people? We decided that a Kickstarter campaign for the initial kickoff was the ticket. We asked for $10,750 and expected to sell maybe 150 books. This was our high-fiving scenario. That 10k was going to be our slow roll into self-financing our project. We hit our goal in 5 days and we both looked at each other too shocked to vocalize our excitement. By the end of the 4-week campaign, we had raised nearly $74,000 with over 600 copies sold. Afterward, we placed a print run order for 1000 books. We're one of those Kickstarter success stories now, and it feels good.
Kickstarter was a good option for us as an all-in-one pop-up shop. Now we’re looking into 2021 to unveil the Moon Atlas and later the Mercury Atlas. Together with The Mars Atlas, they will represent an atlas set of the largest rocky bodies in the inner solar system for which we have data.
