It is wishful thinking, and probably pointless, to expect a visionary politician to come along and embark our nation on a vigorous humans-to-Mars program. That was the theme of a post, and Fox News column that I wrote a couple of weeks ago.

As I said then, it's unlikely that we'll repeat Apollo, both because the political planetary alignment that caused it is very unlikely to repeat, and because even Kennedy wasn't really particularly visionary when it comes to space. But I also said then that if we can't expect a politician to lead us to the high frontier, I would describe just what conditions do have to be in place for it to happen.

We are presently constrained to this planet not because no one wants to go to Mars--the Mars Society puts the lie to that notion. It's because the people who want to go can't afford to, and the people who can afford to have no (or at least insufficient) desire to spend their money in that way. While this will probably strike people as obvious, it's useful to state it nonetheless, because it then provides guidance as to solutions.

There are two solutions.

The traditional one, usually espoused by lobbyists and advocates of space exploration, is to try to persuade those with the money (generally the government) that they should indeed spend it on this. This has been a notably failed strategy, both because such persuasion is difficult, and because even when there is an occasional success in appropriating public resources, the political process invariably perverts the activity away from the original goal, and toward ancillary partisan interests (e.g., job creation in key areas, bureucratic empire building, coopting of the program by the State Department for promotion of international cooperation or foreign aid, etc.).

The other alternative is to reduce the cost of the effort, so that those who already want to do it can afford it. I used to have a signature on my Usenet postings to the effect that "NASA's job is not to land a man on Mars--it's to make it affordable for the National Geographic Society to land a man on Mars."

With his Mars Direct proposal, Bob Zubrin was attempting to tackle the problem from both directions--he came up with a cheaper way to get to Mars, in the hope that he could then convince someone in the government that it had therefore become affordable. However, his approach didn't tackle the real cost problem, which is the cost of getting from earth into space in the first place.

Robert Heinlein once famously wrote, "when you get into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere." Conversely, going to Mars is presently expensive because going anywhere in space is presently expensive. While Mars enthusiasts recognize this, most of them just assume that it's a law of nature, throw up their hands, and say in essence, "to heck with it--we'll just have to convince the government to go anyway."

However, high launch costs are not a consequence of any laws of physics--as I've written previously, they're a consequence of the fact that we do so pitiably little in space--there are no economies of scale.

So rather than lobbying the government to send a few people off to Mars post haste, Mars enthusiasts would be well advised to take their eyes off the prize momentarily, and instead help build a public consensus for much larger space markets, and commercial ones.

The most promising of these is public space travel and entertainment. If we can develop a robust space tourism industry, it will drive costs down, both because they have to be low for it to be a viable business, and because the potentially huge amount of activity (orders of magnitude above anything that NASA is doing, or ever plans to do) will drop the costs of access for everyone, including those who look down their noses at such "pedestrian" uses of space.

If we can use this market to drive down those costs to the point at which the cost of the energy itself becomes significant (which is as low as it can ever go), then the National Geographic Society, or even the Mars Society, would be able to mount their own expeditions, and no longer be dependent on fickle and difficult politicians. In addition, they will be able to do it with a clear conscience, because it will paid for by people who want to pay for it, not those who are forced to. And best of all, they'll be able to ensure that it's under their control, and not hijacked for crass political purposes, as happens almost invariably to government programs (particularly space programs).

So if you want to go to Mars, cheer on the Mark Shuttleworths, and the Lance Basses and Lori Garvers. Support XCOR, Pioneer Rocketplane, Armadillo Aerospace, and Space Adventures and Incredible Adventures and MirCorp, and the X-Prize, and all the other for-profit and non-profit organizations too numerous to mention here, who are working hard to get all of us into space who want to go, and not just a select few.

Note: the following is a thought experiment meant to provoke further (and hopefully better) thought on the matter. From my understanding of Dr. Zubrin's "The Case for Mars", a private corporation might be able to launch the initial Mars mission for under $10 billion. They would also be able to generate revenue from such a mission. The TV rights for the 2000 Sydney Olympics went for about $US 1.5 billion, and corporate sponsorship generated around half a billion dollars. A mars mission would definitely be able to do better than this, and as a wild and unsupported guess, I might say that a Mars mission would do about twice as well as the Olympics, for $4 billion. As well, the sale of samples and the sale of mass allowances for experiments to various organizations would probably bring in billions more. Consider the Mars Exploration Rovers, costing about $500 million each, or $1 billion total (I am not entirely sure about this figure) to send several kilograms of untended scientific tools to Mars for a couple of months. What would a government pay to send a couple of tons of human-tended scientific equipment to the Martian surface for over a year? As another guess, lets say that twice as many experiments are sent as on the MERs, and that the mass of the samples returned is the same as the currently envisioned NASA sample return mission, which is estimated to cost at least 1 billion. If it is assumed that the governments of the world are willing to pay the human mission an amount (per unit mass) equal to what NASA paid on the robotic missions for scientific experiments and samples respectivley, then these governments might pay about $3 billion in total for the samples and sciencific experiments. This brings total revenue to $7 billion, maybe more if a larger mass of samples (or more scientifically useful samples) are returned, or if market forces cause prices to go up (keep in mind, the number of samples and scientific experiments being sent is quite limited). Finally, patents on technology developed, and possible sale of hardware to other groups once the initial mission is over, could be a continuing source of revenue. There certainly wouldn't be a lot of profit (if any), but the point is that most of the costs of a mission would be covered by revenue generated, and a profit might even be made. All it takes is either a rich visionary willing to make a large loan at a low interest rate (I wouldn't bet any money on this one), or a large enough group of not-so-rich people (eg. The Mars Society, or a group of investors) pooling their resources. I believe a very minimal Mission could be done privately; this would certainly not accomplish as much as a government-funded mission, but it might embarrass NASA enough to get them to reconsider their priorities, and would definitely make any future missions much cheaper and safer by developing and demonstrating the technology necessary to send humans to Mars.

Addendum: the above statement agrees with Mr. Simberg's conclusion that those who have the necessary resources must think that a Mars mission is worthwhile before it can happen.

The first thing that needs to happen is to disband the Mars Society. As long as the conversation include anything that sounds like skiffy, which includes just about anything past Earth orbit, you lose a huge chunk of the potential investor audience. Fandom is not the friend of off-planet enterprise, even though they believe they are. Fandom is by and large an extremely ineffectual group of people except for their capacity for alienating mundanes who might otherwise have invested in companies like XCOR.

Regular folks understand satellites. They're real, generate serious income, and fit into real world business plans. The sole goal of those who wish to see space travel available to humanity at large should be cheap access to orbit. Once you have that everything else is attainable.

I'm afraid you have it backwards. Technology does not beget exploration; in fact, quite the opposite is true. Imagine if the Europeans had not colonized North America until they had developed steamships, or even airplanes...the technologies necessary for both vehicles were only developed after there was a great need for rapid trans-Atlantic transportation. Cheap access to space will only make business sense if there is somewhere to go to in space, and something to do there. This is why the aerospace industry is not jumping to develop new ways to get into space; there is not enough happening up there to make it worth their while! Supply follows demand, not the other way around.

But, on a slightly different note, the goals of providing cheap access to space and sending humans to Mars are not mutually exclusive. Even NASA's current (and bloated) Mars Design Reference Mission is only estimated to cost $50 billion. Over the course of a ten-year program, that's only a third of NASA's annual budget. SLI is only a billion dollars a year for the next five years (although I am most emphatically against the program); together that's only $6 billion per year, less than half of NASA's current budget. There need not be any competition between the two objectives!

Finally, I understand and agree that the public holds a rather negative (or perhaps bemused) opinion of space enthusiasts generally. However, the Mars Society is not a space enthusiast society; it is an organization with many people in the aerospace industry. More importantly, it is an organization that is ACCOMPLISHING things. The Mars Arctic Research Station, Desert Research Station, soon-to-be-completed European Research Station, Translife satellite (now in full development, with a launch planned within the next five years), and the fact that Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan radically changed NASA's thinking about humans to Mars, establish the Mars Society as a serious and successful entity. The large amount of publicity that the Mars Society has generated throughout North America and Europe is proof that it is being taken seriously by the media, and it is a safe assumption that the public's perception is a similar one. The Mars Society has done more to inspire youth in the past 3 years than NASA has done in the past 3 decades. I know; I am one of them.