Washington, Apr 13 (IANS): Former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly has launched his first-ever NFT with an art project called "Dreams Out of This World'' to raise money for Ukraine war victims, the media reported.
The project consists of a series of pieces showing Kelly in space, with a variously re-imagined Earth in the background, Space.com reported.
The art pieces, along with some of Kelly's spaceflight memorabilia, were put on auction on Monday.
While the auction was scheduled to continue for three days, on the NFT marketplace OpenSea, the entire collection sold out in just a few hours. It raised more than $500,000, the report said.
"I'm proud to announce that my NFT collection is officially sold out on @opensea.
"Thank you to everyone who supported this project! In the midst of this war, it's amazing that we can come together through art to aid the people of Ukraine. Over $500,000 raised today!" Kelly said in a tweet.
All of the net proceeds from this initial drop will go to the Ukraine efforts of the Global Empowerment Mission (GEM), a non-profit organisation that helps disaster-stricken nations and communities.
Kelly, who had held the record for spending 340 consecutive days aboard the International Space Station in 2015 and 2016, has been a vocal opponent of Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, condemning it repeatedly.
"Putin's war crimes and the Russian people's support or indifference of them has doomed Russia to a very bleak future," Kelly tweeted, in both Russian and English, on April 5.
Kelly's record has now been broken by Mark Vande Hei, who spent 355 days in low-Earth orbit.
The former astronaut said he hopes the project inspires people to reach for the stars, as an iconic book inspired him long ago.
"My story is not the typical astronaut story. I was a bad student growing up... didn't do well in school, kind of a daydreamer," Kelly told Space.com.
"I found inspiration in a book, which is Tom Wolfe's 'The Right Stuff,'" he added.
"So I really, really believe in this idea that inspiration, done in the right way for the right person at the right time, can have extraordinary results."
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are pieces of data, stored in a digital ledger called a blockchain, that represent unique assets.