Is This A Good Idea : Science Channel

May 10, 2011

Just about a year ago, President Obama gave a speech at Kennedy Space Center in which he sketched out his vision for a manned mission to Mars by 2030. If you think that sounds bold, though, just consider this: Techno-entrepreneur Elon Musk, who's probably the closest thing we have to a real-life Tony Stark, is aiming to put his own astronauts on the Red Planet, too, and possibly in about half the time frame envisioned by Obama and NASA.

"We're going all the way to Mars," Musk, the 40-year-old founder of the private rocket and spacecraft company, SpaceX, brashly promised in a recent Wall Street Journal interview. Musk predicts that he'll accomplish it in "best case, 10 years, worst case, 15-20 years." Not only that, but Musk envisions building a privately owned, "self-sustaining" Mars base as well.

Here's the video version of Musk's interview:

A private Mars mission? You may scoff at Musk's hubris or assume that he's making a belated April Fool's Day joke, akin to Google's tongue-in-cheek 2008 announcement that it was joining forces with Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson to launch Virgle, a private Mars base. But remember that SpaceX has a slew of impressive achievements. Last December, for example, it became the first private outfit to launch a spacecraft into orbit and then successfully recover it. SpaceX is angling to become a replacement for the space shuttle program, a potentially lucrative franchise that could enable Musk to find backers and/or partners down the road for an interplanetary project.

And if Musk doesn't go to Mars first, some other company might. After all, the idea of private missions to Mars has been around for decades. Back in 1990, Robert Zubrin, founder of the National Space Society, a space-exploration advocacy group, proposed Mars Direct, a plan that utilized mostly existing technology to reach the Red Planet and establish a base for a cut-rate price tag in the $20 billion range. Here's a 1996 Ad Astra article by Zubrin, explaining how the plan would work.

In fact, some suggest that a private Mars mission might be the only way that humans reach the Red Planet. As Mars exploration advocates C.A. Carberry, Artemis Westenberg and Blake Ortner wrote in a 2010 article in the Journal of Cosmology:

Despite the fact that Virgle was just an extremely well executed hoax, it stimulated some very intriguing questions -- most notably -- would a corporate partnership or consortium like Virgle really be able to launch a private mission to Mars? There are many people who believe that a private mission to Mars is not only possible, but perhaps the only way that the United States will be able to get there ... They feel that NASA has become too bureaucratic to develop an affordable human Mars mission; that a human mission would fall victim to a lack of long-term political will in Congress and cannot be carried through multiple administrations.

Another private Mars mission proponent, Rhawn Joseph, has even sketched a plan for financing a Mars mission. Joseph would peddle naming rights, license Mars colony-related merchandise, sell pieces of Martian real estate and even produce a reality TV show to generate revenue in support of establishing a Martian base. Here's a recent Space.com article looking at the pros and cons of Joseph's plan.

Those gambits might well help with seed money, but I suspect that in order to raise billions of dollars, a private-sector Mars exploration program would have to offer some incredibly lucrative potential opportunity to investors. That sort of potential payoff might come from mining, though as this Discovery News article details, we don't yet know that much about what minerals exist on Mars and in what quantities they might be found, or whether they could be harvested. This 2005 article from NASA's website examines the complexity of extracting minerals from the sandy Martian surface. Building a plant to manufacture super-sophisticated electronics is another possibility, since Mars' thin atmosphere might enable it to make semiconductors with far greater purity. (Here's a recent NASA article on making computer chips in space.) Manufacturing exotic pharmaceuticals could also turn into a lucrative venture.

I also can think of a lot of reasons why allowing the private sector to explore and possibly colonize Mars could be a bad idea, as well. For one, the primary purpose of such a venture would have to be generating a profit, rather than simply acquiring knowledge and making it available to scientists all over the world. What if private Mars explorers chose to keep their research data proprietary and gave access only to those willing to pay a hefty price? That could stunt scientific progress. Additionally, there aren't any government regulatory agencies on Mars to oversee how a commercial colony and protect workers or the Martian environment. We could end up with a 21st-century version of the Dutch East India Company, the outfit that basically was given free license to commit all sorts of crimes to benefit its shareholders. (Here's an insightful blog post by libertarian commentator Bonnie Kristian on that subject.)

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.