To Mars For $200K

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Last week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk promised that his plan to colonize Mars would be, if nothing else, entertaining. The man has a flair for understatement.

As our news story reports today, Musk unveiled his Mars ambitions at the Astronautical Congress meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico. Ambitious hardly does it justice for if anyone other than Musk had announced this plan, they would likely have been removed in a straightjacket.

Musk thinks earthlings need to be a multi-planetary species because sooner or later, we’ll trash the home world beyond redemption or some natural calamity will do it for us. If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s Collapse, you’ll get the picture. What’s startling about Musk’s proposal is that he’s not thinking about, oh, say, a century from now, but closer to next week. He wants to start sending humans to Mars in about 10 years.

Ultimately, he envisions massive booster systems—reusable, of course—carrying 100 to 200 people on Martian journeys for a cost of about $200,000 or about what Virgin Galactic proposes to charge passengers for a short sub-orbital lob. If that doesn’t send your eyes into gimbal lock, this will: He imagines an entire Martian economy composed of millions of inhabitants, sustained by a regular shuttle service from Earth.

The urge to lampoon this as a dingbat project is almost irresistible, but I’ll restrain myself. Rare is the visionary who hasn’t been seen as a crackpot at some point. I do have one overarching question: What propels it? The great explorations of the past have generally been animated for three reasons, or a combination: attempts to expand commercial markets beyond the horizon, political and military expansionism and, occasionally, pure science. The Apollo program put bootprints in the moon’s regolith as a version of political expansionism. It was a PR race with the Soviets. When the race was won, Apollo dried up like a plum in the desert. The U.S. space program never really recovered.

SpaceX’s remarkable success as an upstart launch provider has been driven by commercial imperatives, mainly the commercial satellite market and ISS contract business from NASA. At its peak in 1966, NASA’s budget was 4.4 percent of the total federal budget. Now it struggles to remain at 0.5 percent, the point being there’s not much money there and certainly not enough to fund a Mars program that envisions colonization.

Musk said as much in Guadalajara and was vague about where the money will come from. If Mars has commercially viable resources to exploit, it’s not clear to me they would return on the staggering investment it would take to just get there, much less establish vibrant, sustainable industry. Or are we talking about an interplanetary Club Med here? Remember Elton John’s Rocket Man? “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kid. In fact, it’s cold as hell.”

If a Mars project is pitched as a sort of celestial lifeboat, a place to run when the Earth is totally spent, well good luck with that. The Earth’s current population can’t even make meaningful agreements about the real environmental threats it faces. Planning far enough ahead and spending vast resources for a contingency is not our forte.

So, maybe Musk will figure this out. But the more interesting question is this: If that $200,000 flight to Mars were available, would you buy a seat? I put up a rare midweek poll so you can tell us what you think.

The foregoing is opinion and commentary based on disclosed facts.AVwebwelcomes other points of view, including guest blogs.

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