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It's good to see there is some action on the board.
Just wanted to add some more thoughts. Like you said, the key to getting people interested in Mars is hype. Scientists and engineers aren't very good salesman. If the market it right, the general public will be begging the government to raise taxes to fund a Mars mission. Someone said that the public is to shallow and disinterested to support a Mars mission. That's the whole point, the public is shallow and they can be told what to think. Everything that's cool is marketed on Madison Avenue. Trust me, if they can make the "Macarena" a popular song they can make Mars seem cool and trendy. I don't think a corporate exploration is that bad, it's probably the only way. We forget that the greatest explorations in human history were corporate or trips for profit. The Dutch East India company was responsible for most of the routes to India and Asia and for the colonization. Marco Polo's trip to the orient was a pure merchant/commercial trip. The most successful colonization trips by England and Spain in the New World were a result of private enterprise. And if that doesn't work we can always send our prisoners to the moon and mars and start prison colonies, that's how Australia started out. The exploration of Mars should be paved with hype.
This is an idea I have, why not get money for a mission to mars by treating it like the olympics.
NBC payed 3.5 billion dollars for Oympic broadcast rights!!!! The total cost of the Nagano games was around 10 billion dollars!!!! Just sell the mission and all the TV and movie rights. If a network gets exculsive content, who knows how much they'll pay. Then you can get soda companies, car makers, and electronics companies to sponsor it. Who knows how much Coke or Pepsi would pay to be the official soft drink of the first manned mission to mars. You just have to make it a big event and fill it with pomp and circumstance. Have big launch and landing ceremonies and other shameless promotional whoring. The companies who put in the most money get their logo on the spaceship and we can give them a couple million acres of martian land if they put in enough. Just like the olympics part of the cost will be paid by the government (NASA) and the other part will be paid by the corporate sponsors. If you need to scrounge up a couple of billion dollars, theres no better way to do it. I'm interested in any of your ideas.
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