To reach Mars, Zubrin proposed replacing NASA's huge ship with a vessel small and light enough to be launched directly from Earth. It would not need to carry fuel for the return trip because the Martian explorers, like Amundsen, would exploit local resources: the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere, which when combined with hydrogen brought from Earth, could be converted to methane and liquid oxygen to fuel the return voyage. Zubrin built a machine to demonstrate how easily it could be done, and eventually NASA adopted his idea. It redesigned the Mars mission, lowering the cost estimate from $400 billion to $55 billion, and is contemplating a trip sometime after 2010.
But Zubrin, who's now the president of his own firm in Boulder, Pioneer Astronautics, has pared down NASA's plans to come up with a still cheaper mission. He figures that within a decade a private entrepreneur could get to Mars and back for a mere $5 billion. He's been promoting this idea in lectures and in a book, The Case for Mars, that has been translated into half a dozen languages and attracted letters from thousands of Mars enthusiasts around the world. (See "Spaceship Enterprise," April 1997.)
Other engineers estimate the cost of a private mission might be more like $10 billion, maybe up to $20 billion, but even at those prices the trip is not an absurdly extravagant dream. NASA's budget for a single year is $13 billion. For the estimated cost of building and operating the space station, $100 billion, you could send a fleet of Zubrin's ships to Mars. By NASA standards, the cost of a private Mars mission is chump change.
But by venture capital standards, it's a lot of money for a highly speculative endeavor. To pay for the mission, Zubrin and members of the Mars Society have been analyzing the financing techniques of pre-NASA explorers and looking for new ideas. Some possibilities:
The Mars Prize. Zubrin tried selling this idea during a dinner with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who got so enthusiastic that the meal lasted for four hours. But Gingrich never followed through on the proposal, which calls for Congress to promise $20 billion to the first explorers who reach Mars and return. In case that prize isn't enough to interest entrepreneurs in such a risky all-or-nothing venture, Zubrin also envisions offering smaller bonuses for achieving technical milestones along the way, like sending the equipment for making fuel to Mars.
Prizes have been used in the past to spur public-private ventures in exploration. Fifteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese rulers offered financial inducements to captains who ventured down the African coast and across the Atlantic. In the 19th century, the British Parliament offered cash awards for reaching the North Pole and for venturing westward into the Arctic ice: a prize of [sterling]5,000 for reaching 110 degrees west, double that for reaching 130 degrees, and triple that for 150 degrees.
For politicians, the most appealing aspect of the Mars Prize is that they could reap the publicity of announcing it without having to pay for it immediately. They could present themselves as both patrons of exploration and opponents of make-work government programs. NASA would surely object to the proposal, and so might libertarian purists, who could argue that there's no need for the public to finance any kind of Martian adventure. But to some extent, the knowledge gained from Martian exploration would be a public good; so would the national glory, for whatever that's worth. And there's always the preservation-of-the-species argument: By supporting the exploration of a potential new home, the public is buying insurance against Earth's becoming uninhabitable.
The Mars Prize would certainly be more defensible than NASA's current monopoly on public funds for space exploration. Still, there's no reason the trip must be financed by the government. Entrepreneurial explorers have long profited from the fortunes and egos of...
Rich Patrons. In 1911, William Randolph Hearst offered a $50,000 prize to the first person to fly across America in less than 30 days. Calbraith Perry Rodgers immediately set out to win it in a plane called the Vin Fiz, named after a carbonated grape drink manufactured by his sponsor, the Armour Meat Packing Company. He endured 15 accidents on the way from New York to Los Angeles, one of which landed him in the hospital for a month. He didn't meet the deadline--it took him 84 days--but he did complete the trip. Other prizes have been offered for human-powered flight (a $200,000 award claimed in 1978, when the Gossamer Albatross flew a mile) and for the first manned, completely reusable spaceship (a $10 million award, announced in 1996 by the X Prize Foundation, that has yet to be claimed).
The Mars Prize would be an expensive proposition, but modern-day Hearsts such as Bill Gates could afford to offer it. Or they could directly finance expeditions, the way wealthy gentlemen supported polar exploration at the start of the century. Robert Peary, for instance, was bankrolled by the Peary Arctic Club, a group of businessmen who paid for the privilege of basking in his company and achieving geographic immortality. Peary and other polar explorers named mountains and glaciers after the American, British, and Norwegian plutocrats who financed the discoveries. Mars' most prominent features, like its 18-mile-high volcano and 2,800-mile-long version of the Grand Canyon, have already been named, but the first explorers there--and certainly the first settlers--could exercise their prerogative to assign new names.
The patrons of Arctic expeditions also sometimes paid to tag along for part of the trip. Peary brought wealthy sponsors on his ship; Frederick C. Cook was accompanied by a sportsman who wanted to hunt. The Mars mission--six months traveling there, two years on the surface, and six months back--might be too grueling a vacation for the typical billionaire. But plenty of other people would pay for a chance to go along, and there's a clever way to get hold of their money.
The Mars Lottery. Perhaps the most promising new idea at the conference in Boulder came from someone outside the aerospace industry. Alex Duncan, a local resident with experience in the commodities business, proposed an international Mars Lottery, modeled on the lottery based in Lichtenstein that raises funds internationally for the Red Cross. A Mars Lottery could be headquartered anywhere and reach a global audience through the Internet.
Besides the usual cash prizes, which could be awarded fortnightly or monthly, the Mars Lottery would have two big selling points. First, participants would know that a portion of the proceeds was going to support a private expedition to Mars. Second, and more important, participants would be buying a chance to go themselves. Duncan proposed that all the winners of the regular drawings become eligible for a grand prize: a berth on the first ship to Mars, assuming that the winner of this grand drawing met the physical and mental requirements for the voyage. Duncan figures that the proceeds from this lottery could pay for the whole Mars mission within three to five years.
A variation on his scheme would be to give the winner of each regular drawing the option of trying out for the mission at the explorers' training camp, which would probably be in the Arctic (to simulate the frigid conditions on Mars). The leader of the crew could evaluate dozens, maybe hundreds, of different winners and choose one or two for the trip. This system would produce a better crew and also increase the appeal of the lottery, because each winner would be getting an Arctic adventure in addition to the cash prize.
Media and Marketing. The Summer Olympics last just three weeks and generate more than $2 billion in fees from television networks and corporate sponsors. The three-year Mars mission has the potential to make much more money, possibly enough to pay for itself, solely with the revenue from media rights and corporate tie-ins.
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