In the last few years, the rise of crowd funding as allowed for some pretty cool stuff to start existing: gaming platforms, art, books, movies, musicals, DVDs. I've supported a fair number of kickstarters in my time, but today I am excited to announce a kickstarter that will melt Veronica Mars with its awesome. Planetary Resources in partnership with the Museum of Flight and the Planetary Society is kickstarting a space telescope. Yeah. So I know you have a lot of questions, and I have some answers. First, what the frick is Planetary Resources? We've actually talked about them here before on SciShow, they're a new start-up that plans to mine asteroids for the water and precious metals they contain. And yes, that sounds crazy but with a team full of former NASA mission specialists and capital from the co-founders of Google, it's clear that they're not joking around. How much are they raising? They're shooting for a million dollars. This will support the manufacture, launch, and support of one ARKYD 100 Space Telescope. ARKYD. What does that stand for? Nothing, actually. It's adapted from the name of a company that makes droids in the Star Wars universe, and no, I am not kidding. A million bucks does not seem to be enough for a space telescope. Well it isn't, and it is. First, Planetary Resources is funding the development of the telescope outside of the kickstarter. In fact, they'll be launching a bunch of these telescopes. They're small, and most of them will be searching for asteroids that are good candidates for mining. One of them will be for the world to use. Its launch and support will be funded by the kickstarter. It will be open for use by scientists, researchers, supporters, and students. So when you say it's small, how small is small? They ARKYD telescopes are not very big, and thanks to advances in optics and computer technology, they don't really have to be. I could hold one in my hands just like this, so it's no Hubble Space Telescope here, but is like 2500 times cheaper. So if they're using a small telescope why don't they just put a small telescope here on Earth? Because using telescopes on the Earth is terrible. Light is dimmed and warped as it comes through the atmosphere, making it necessary to have much larger telescopes with extremely advanced optics that are extremely expensive to get the same resolution as the ARKYD. Space telescopes don't have to worry about weather or light pollution or whether it's daytime or nighttime, so they could just take pictures all day long. Most of the telescopes Planetary Resources is launching will be searching for the faint signals of asteroids that might be good for mining, and these telescopes are particularly designed to detect the faint light reflected off of those bodies, but the crowd funded telescope will be available for science, for discovery, and for fun, but most importantly, it will be available for us all. It's an opportunity for us to come together to do something great, something that, until very recently, would have been impossible both technologically and culturally. If all goes well, the ARKYD Space Telescopes will be launching in 2015. Thank you for watching this edition of SciShow news. If you have any questions or comments or suggestions for us, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or down in the comments below, and if you want to continue getting smarter with us here at SciShow, you can go to youtube.com/scishow and subscribe.