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I have only ever meet one man in person who was interested in going into space, and he had virtually no money.
It all depends who you talk to. Our numbers seem small because we're so evenly distributed, but numerous surveys show we're a huge constituency.
Any scheme for grass roots funding is going to be seen as a charitable donation which is not going to be good PR at all. Hum, save starving kids in africa or let some people build a giant rocket which might not work...
That just isn't the case. People give big money to college football programs, art galleries, film schools, landmark preservation funds, and many other purposes that are trivial compared to feeding starving children. Human expansion beyond Earth isn't trivial in any way, shape, or form, and I think most people understand that when it's put to them clearly. Furthermore, while there would inevitably be short-sighted people who think it shows a lack of priorities, I believe it would excite and give hope to far more around the world. Just look at what happened after the recent Ansari trip: The people who belittled her for "wasting" her money on "sightseeing" were specks in an ocean of gratitude and admiration, and all she did was go to ISS for a week.
The only way to get into space on private funding is to make money as you go.
Definitely one way, but we better hope it's not the only way. There is nothing to sell between Earth orbit and Lunar orbit, and nothing to sell between the Earth-Moon system and Mars besides the infrequent NEO approach. The costs of going to Mars, which are our concern here, simply have to be swallowed by somebody to get there, and nobody with the institutional means is going to do it in our lifetimes. Nor do I believe commercialism will get us there all by itself; it hasn't even given us hypersonic civil air transport in forty years of having the core technologies available, and this is several orders of magnitude more difficult.
I'm not saying it's easy or guaranteed to work, but I'm actually being more realistic here than the contrary position: NASA will not get to Mars in our lifetimes if ever, that much is almost undeniable. All of the commercial, privately-funded space R&D from now until 2020 put together probably won't equal the money we're talking about, even under the most optimistic forecasts, so relying on commerce for this is a non-starter. That leaves us, so we'd better figure out a way to do this if we want to see it happen in our lifetimes.
Even though Burt hasn't got great technology, incapable of even geting into orbit, he is already using it to make money, after the initial infusion of cash/venture capital, which will probalby be re-invested into designing the t/space capsule and so on. Take small steps and make sure they're all profitable.
A point I forgot to make above was that the distances and difficulties involved in Earth to Mars are exponentially greater than Earth to Moon, and there are no intermediate steps on which to build a business case. Okay, so you've got your flourishing economy in orbit, Bigelow module hotels, research stations, cheap reusable rockets that launch every day, on-orbit refueling capability, etc. Now a human Mars mission costs $15 billion instead of $35 billion, and it's now 2030--effectively no closer to happening for the private sector, but if NASA, Congress, and the White House all happen to be in the mood at the same time, they could then decide to be on Mars by 2045. Which means, in practical terms, that if everything went perfectly in the interim, they would actually make their first attempt sometime around 2050. But since there's no guaranteeing the government would commit as soon as the cost became politically acceptable, the attempt could be five years, ten years, thirty years later than that, or never. As I said above, it's up to us, so we better get cracking.
My father grew up on a farm that had an outhouse instead of a toilet, and watched from his college dorm as human beings walked on the Moon. I grew up in a suburban house with cable TV, a computer, a washer-dryer, a dishwasher, and an automatic garage, and all I've seen come up are camera phones and iPods. The books I read as a young teenager showed me what was possible, and the history just before my time convinced me that mine would be even more amazing, but it hasn't happened. And the extreme difference between the promise and what actually occurred makes me physically sick. I see society turning inward, and feel a great sense of urgency about this.
I volunteered to help my former private high school raise +$1 million in less than a year -- and so I understand that your fundraising idea can seem like a good idea, but it really is -- or should be -- a bigger deal than an email database.
Yes, I do understand that. I was just saying that it's possible, as an extreme case, in order to illustrate that GCNRevenger's objections were illusionary. He seemingly wants to believe that you need a huge secretarial staff, file clerks, a dedicated office building, a giant Unix network, and a corporate accounting department to even begin taking pledges. Personally, I think NASA has brainwashed some people into thinking a cup of coffee should have a Critical Design Review and a committee attached to it.
As to your experiences, I find it encouraging that you could raise +$1 million in less than a year from such a limited donor set. After all, there can't be that many alumni or parents of students to solicit for donations, and I'm guessing their pledges weren't conditional or deferred. For what I'm thinking of, the initial resources would be relatively small and evolve with the effort--information could be kept on commercially encrypted DVDs while not in use, meaning there'd be no need for storage server expenses and security risks would be minimal.
But actually, details like this aren't really important at this point. I've let myself be sidetracked by GCNRevenger's absurd nitpicking, but what's important right now is sounding out the core concept and seeing if anyone sees merit. I'm perfectly open to other ideas about how to make (emphasis on make, not lobby for) a human Mars mission, but I've thought a lot about this and haven't come up with anything else. Commercial schemes only work if you already have a mission, funded, built, and ready to go--industry just won't take it seriously until you do. So deferred conditional pledges are the only option I see. But thanks for the advice anyway; I sure hope this goes far enough to put it into practice.
If we really want people on Mars we can't afford to gloss over the barriers and problems. Doing so only wrecks our credibility further.
I'm not trying to gloss over the complexities of the mission itself, or even what it takes to get a mission going, but I am trying to show that (a)this is the only way we could hope to get to Mars in our lifetimes, and (b)it is possible. GCNRevenger is not "crushing all opposition," but engaging in the kind of useless naysaying that demands detailed blueprints at a brainstorming session. The actual plan to set foot on Mars is Mars Direct, whose pros and cons have already been debated ad nauseum here and elsewhere; what I am talking about is funding, by the only method that doesn't have decades of failure behind it.
The logistics of inventing, financing and building new, man rated Mars mission components needs to be well thought through and fully costed but I don't really see that anywhere except in the vague descriptions of the various Mars mission plans we have all read about.
Right now the issue is financing, by far the Mt. Everest of obstacles to such a mission. Most experts who've looked at the issue seem to agree that we've had the technology since the Reagan administration, but that cost was the deal-breaker. That isn't to say it won't involve a lot of engineering challenges, but the know-how is essentially there. And you can't even begin to really address the technical issues until you have funding; a few months on Devon field-testing spacesuits just doesn't cut it.
If a Mars mission plan is going to presented to the private sector for funding consideration or for fund raising efforts from the wider general community it must be able to stand up under the harshest criticism at all levels if it is to stand a decent chance of being taken seriously, and so far this has not really happened.
I don't know that this is a valid or even possible criteria. NASA has become notorious for being incapable of taking risks or making real progress, and one of the reasons is they're forced by the political leadership to please a monstrous array of constituencies whose interests have nothing to do with the mission. They end up taking no risks, achieving practically nothing, take five times as long to do it, and spend ten times as much money doing it, and we're still nowhere. And they still get hammered--even Apollo was considered a worthless boondoggle by certain people, and it was the most worthwhile space program we ever had. The reason private funding is necessary is because doing it like NASA or private business doesn't work--there are just too many unknowns and too many easier goals.
Even suborbital tourism is considered "wildly risky" by mainstream investors. So, having established what our options are (all one of them), we then find out how to go about it. I already presented earlier in the thread a broad outline of a phased fundraising structure targeted at increasingly broader audiences, which would benefit at each step from the momentum and credibility of earlier progress. The amount of convincing needed would increase with the breadth of the audience, but then so would the amount of support the effort would be getting to provide it.
And no, I don't believe for a moment anyone who'd support this would demand a 500-page Omnibus blueprint of the entire mission before they'd pledge. What they'd want is to see that it's credible, has some support among leading figures, and that the people running it believe in it and are seriously dedicated. If you plonked a telephone book full of technical details in front of them, even most space nuts would be driven away--they'd wonder, if you've already got everything so slick and detailed, why you aren't talking to Lockheed and Boeing instead of average Joes who want to play a role in humanity's destiny. For the overwhelming majority of people who want this mission, they don't care how it happens as long as it happens, and the way they'd decide if it's credible is by listening to the people who are selling it--not by reading the blueprints for the hab module's toilet.
So the first step is to come up with a decent and robust Mars mission plan
As I've said, it's called Mars Direct, it's been rigorously examined and largely vindicated, and it's been around for two decades.
Such a plan would need many scientists and engineers to work on it
The final plan would, but certainly not the preliminary mission architecture used in the early fundraising phases.
And you won't raise a cent with a vague and half done plan that ignores various problems facing a Mars mission.
That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. You're saying people wouldn't pledge money to develop an existing mission plan because it isn't already fully developed. Also, who do you think we're talking about here? A bunch of NASA bureaucrats? The people who would contribute to this want to see a Mars mission happen, and will be looking at two very simple things: Are these people serious, and are these people credible? When they see both in the affirmative, and the plan for developing the mission is explained, they'll come on board. I can't imagine anyone who is serious about a mission being obtuse enough to be unsatisfied with that before even making conditional pledges.
There is a growing number within the space and Mars community who are working on many of these issues and are gradually moving towards solutions.
I know they think they are, and it looks like they are compared to NASA, but they really aren't. What they're doing is focusing their efforts on relatively small issues because the main issue (financing) is too hard and discouraging. But it wouldn't be so hard or so discouraging if they chose to focus on it, chose to do the hard thing instead of hiding in the minutiae of a mission that won't even happen until they get serious about it. Finding out the number of particles of toxic oxides that penetrate a space suit seal doesn't make a Mars mission more likely to happen, no matter what it contributes to the success of a hypothetical one. But if you have the money, then tests like that actually mean something.
If the prize to be won is big enough, then the private money will come, because that money is out there.
Unfortunately, the government has no intention of offering such a prize. The pork-hungry wolves have been warned to the threat posed by prize competitions, and are now trying to move in against even the modest Centennial Challenges. A Mars Prize is out of the question. It's all up to us if we want humanity to get there.
What other reason can you give people to do so, other than "to see the mission happen"? Could you at least promise property rights on Mars, or maybe one place on your mission for a tourist astronaut, a la Space Adventures, to be awarded maybe by a lottery to those who gave you money?
There are countless promotional strategies one could imagine, and numerous variations on each one. Giving up a seat directly would be a bad idea, since it would compromise the chances of mission success by not having the absolute best person in that slot. But, on the other hand, you might give donors a pass through the first few layers of screening if they're qualified or give them the edge in a tie. There's also naming rights: the program, the mission, the rocket, the various modules, the Mars injection stage, the habitats sent ahead, the lander, the ascent stage, the base, rovers, the landscape features explored by the astronauts, etc. Pledgers of a certain level could be entitled to half a gram of Mars rock, or (at a much higher level) have their names carved into a boulder. You might even make these variable according to dollar amount, so that x dollars = y grams of Mars material, and/or your name on a boulder with the letters a certain size. At the very top donor levels, you could deliver small photographs and trinkets, and send back pictures of them on the surface of Mars. As I say, the permutations are endless.
Great, but most will place more weight on stuff like a house, education for their children, health insurance than a vague promise of a mission to Mars which they'd only get to see on TV.
But we're not talking about most people. Most people are dull, unimaginative, cautious, and myopic, and the human species would never have gotten where it is if the cranks who make all the progress cared what most people thought. What I'm talking about are the concentric groups of people who seriously want this to happen: First, the fanatics (like me) who understand the true importance of human expansion, and would be willing to dedicate a large part of yearly disposable income and personal effort to see it happen. Then, the strongly enthusiastic, who are willing to devote substantial resources despite having other commitments. Next, the moderate enthusiast, who puts a decent amount on the table and is fascinated with the concept, but whose lives don't revolve around it. These are the people who would get the ball rolling, and in that order.
After momentum built up, other groups would get involved to a lesser extent; the common space enthusiast, who might pledge anywhere from ten to a few hundred dollars because they're excited at the boldness of the idea; then the general science- and technology-oriented public, whose interest would slowly catch on, and whose involvement could run the gamut; and finally, at peak momentum, you would have large-scale community support, kids sending in a couple dollars, corporations looking for sponsorship deals, etc etc.
I say you'd better convince some of those experts and co-opt them in your team from the beginning. They should also become public advocates of your idea, especially if they are known by the public. This should increase your credibility and fund/pledge-raising ability.
Yes, definitely. The key is to have at least a handful of people with credibility supporting the idea and being the public face of the core fanatics. Most leaders in the space advocacy community have "respected leader" syndrome, afraid to sound crazy because they're already part of a movement the general public sees as "fringy." So they want to protect their hard-earned status by taking unambitious routes to their goals--lobbying, conventions, and educating the public. But if you got leaders from three or four respected organizations on board, each would be less individually afraid of publicly advocating it. Unfortunately, I'm not juiced in with anyone, I'm just a member of various orgs--so all I can do is talk to people and hope it catches on in some way.
You need considerable real money before you can actually do anything that can show your competence - projects, designs, concept-prove tests. Consider the fact that they stand to lose reputation, time and money if they stand behind a doomed project. Can you convince them that the risk is worth it?
I don't think they'd actually be risking that much, and eventually they could be convinced of that fact. In whose eyes would they lose face if it failed? The members of space advocacy groups are bold people who get excited when others among them step forward to take bold chances--just look at the explosion in excitement that occurred after the X-Prize, and still going strong. And even when it doesn't work out, like with the Planetary Society's solar sail, people remain committed. As for the general public, who cares? They're not going anywhere. They'd still be sitting on their couches in the suburbs watching Idol no matter how far humanity spreads.
Also, since nobody would pay a dime until the whole amount had been pledged, failure short of that point would merely be discouraging--but so what? We'd be willing to risk billions of dollars and (many of us) our own lives getting to Mars, so the danger of floundering before a single dollar has been spent is laughable. Worrisome, but hardly intimidating. Furthermore, most of these leaders wouldn't have to stump for the program, just express support for it, and only those directly involved would take care of the rest.
Get this through your thick heads, stop arguing and instead let's focus on moving forward with going to Mars Direct, making it a reality
My sentiments exactly. What I'm talking about here is an outline sketch of a possible way of funding Mars Direct, and one that doesn't rely on convincing investors who've consistently shied away from even modest space proposals. People who won't invest in suborbital travel, with its relative simplicity and market research, are never going to even look at something this radical until it's already happening, so that leaves us with NASA or the space community at large. NASA I don't trust, and I don't believe we should rely on them even if they are successful. They have totally failed to expand access even to the regions they've been working for decades, so there's no reason to assume a NASA Moon base or Mars base would be any different. Furthermore, it's highly doubtful whether they will ever in fact make it to Mars, so it comes down to us.
We're the ones who want this to happen, so we're the ones who have to make it happen. The alternative is we wait thirty, forty, or maybe fifty years for NASA to plop a handful of astronauts on Mars, and at best create a sterile dugout that never expands, never becomes self-sufficient, and is incapable of seeding human settlement. Most of us won't be alive in 2056, and there is no reason whatsoever mankind can't be on Mars by the time NASA is laughably claiming it'll be back on the Moon. They're wasting our time, and so are we unless we get serious and make this happen.
Lots of money if you are talking about several million donators. Cash money, not paper pledges, cash. Where will you get this money from?
Well, let's see now. Say two million names, addresses, telephone numbers, email information, and pledge amounts--that's a tiny fraction of the information in Wal-Mart's personnel database--it only has to be entered once, and an email can automatically be sent reminding them to renew their pledge every year. There's no reason it couldn't be handled by one person through one computer, with the information stored on DVDs, so if that person is a volunteer your only data costs are the web site, the computer, professional versions of the required software, and perhaps special security measures to keep spammers from getting the info. My own computer could probably handle it with less than $1,000 in software upgrades, which I'd gladly donate. Once again, you've identified a problem that doesn't exist.
So, you want to take out an insurance policy where the insurer doesn't get paid if people don't fork over tens of billions of dollars to a private entity.
The number and scope of policies is arbitrary, each for a small percentage of the total shortfall, and their liability would only kick in after a certain amount of money had been delivered as specified in each. For instance, policy A guarantees $10 million after 75% of total pledges have been collected, if the value of that policy in remaining pledges is not delivered within x time. The due diligence stipulations should be relatively simple, especially since most insurers would consider it highly improbable their liability terms would ever come to pass.
Yes, borrow real cash money against stuff you are going to buy with little/no profitable use besides large scale spaceflight which you will purchase with imaginary money.
No, borrow money against the tens of billions in cash already delivered to make up for minimal shortfalls as a last resort--in the unlikely event you'd get that close and fail to generate institutional investments. There are so many diverse ways to make this happen, and so many possible backup contingencies, that you're getting confused and acting as if these are liabilities. It's the same old can't-do attitude that has NASA rotting from within, and blind to self-evident opportunities.
by "clearly spelled out" means doing the engineering to really lay out whats needed and how you will actually go about getting to Mars.
It's called Mars Direct, and it was clearly spelled out decades ago. That's the whole point of this thread: We have the technology, we have the plan, we have the desire, all we need is the money.
Not a vauge outline and rough mass or cost estimates like Bob and MSFC have cooked up, but something to show that you are serious and competant.
This remark is obtuse and ignorant. NASA examined Zubrin's numbers in detail and found them to be right on the mark, and that's when it was supposed to be a government operation; the organization that would be formed to implement the plan once the money is in place would be a nonprofit corporation with all the advantages of the private sector and a nation-sized budget. Which means the actual cost would probably be fully a third less, and the hardware more reliable because it wouldn't be compromised by mission creep or political contracting decisions.
And this would have to be done before people would make pledges of billions or donations of millions.
That isn't true at all. People understand that technology evolves, best practices are fed back into processes, and that any rigid bolt-by-bolt blueprint would be nothing more than a guess. They would have the primary details, a budget and schedule breakdown, and descriptions of how the mission would be built and planned, but not an exact model of the outcome. That's part of the excitement of working on space programs, as anyone who's ever been involved in one can tell you, and nobody who would pledge to something like this would be scared away by that--any rational person would expect it, and some would even find it an important part of the experience, watching the program grow and evolve.
And don't you have to have a credible plan before these men would sign on? But you need money to make a credible plan first!
No. The fact that you've convinced people to pledge billions of dollars, some of which would be secured, would have experts in the field beating down your door to be involved. And when the actual cash started pouring in, you would have to go out of your way to escape them. You don't seem to understand that money attracts people, even if there wasn't such a radically compelling vision behind it as a human Mars mission. Everyone with any sort of tenuous professional connection to what was happening would try to get in on the money for their pet projects, which means a Darwinian process would unfold leaving the most talented people in the world a place on the team. Government grants worth $100 million stir up feeding frenzies in business and academia; what do you think $20 billion in the hands of a private organization looking for the best of the best in every related field would do?
There is great beauracratic inertia behind NASA, and now NASA does have a destination.
Yes, the Moon. And if (mind you, IF) they ever get there again, why do you expect the NASA lunar base will be any different than ISS and Shuttle? They'll do the same old make-work experiments, with the addition of some ISRU research that won't significantly defray costs, and once again we'll be left pouring money into an infrastructure with no apparent purpose. It'll cost more than ISS to build, expand, staff, and supply, and the only purpose of being there will be....being there. They won't do anything significant to create a self-sufficient outpost, won'tattempt to transfer production resources to the Moon, won'tdo anything to expand humanity's access to the Moon, won't do anything but spend money and look cool, and eventually it will be cancelled. They'll pretend they're refocusing on Mars, but the money will never materialize, and we'll be back to going in circles. NASA can't be trusted to deliver on the human angle anymore--the politics will not allow it to succeed. We have to do this ourselves.
Comparisons with the X-Prize or Howard "Screamin'" Dean's breif campaign prove that your grip on reality concerning the practicality of this funding method is less than tenuous.
The X-Prize was modeled on the Orteig Prize, which was about three orders of magnitude smaller. Your references to scale are, as I said, nothing more than can't-do naysaying based on the old standby of believing it can't be done because it hasn't been done before, and people who think as you do are constantly proven wrong and never learn their lesson. Who would ever have gotten anywhere listening to you? It's always too much of a challenge, always a fool's errand. We all might as well go home and sip lemonade on our lawn chairs until the stars burn out, because it's just too hard to do anything. Why exactly do you post on the Mars Society boards with an attitude like this?
Yes. NASA can't do any worse than the last thirty years.
Sure they can. And history can also repeat itself. Or, on the bright side, it's possible that after thirty years of continuously mediocre funding, NASA will be slightly closer to Mars than today, but I consider it very unlikely they will ever set foot on Mars, let alone establish a "presence."
and perhaps that we are more competant than crazy folk who want to raise tens of billions of dollars with pledges.
I don't see any hint of "competence" in the false excuses you keep making up for why it's impossible. In fact, quite the opposite. You seem to think recordkeeping that could be done by a single volunteer on an average home computer would be stratospherically expensive, that insurance companies are less inclined to accept policies for events most people consider highly unlikely, and that industry professionals wouldn't want a piece of a multi-billion dollar project unless they had every single nut and bolt detailed for them. Frankly, you give the impression of someone with no knowledge whatsoever of logistics, and a penchant for vastly inflating the difficulty of simple tasks. That isn't competence, it's bureaucracy.
1. You don't know how many pledges will really come through. Even if people want to fulfil their pledges, it is hard for anyone to pledge now to give a certain sum in ten years. One could be bankrupt or dead in ten years.
There are many ways to deal with those possibilities.
1. Bankruptcy:
(a)Let them know from the beginning they'll have to renew their pledges every year to keep them "on the board."
(b)Email/smail/phone/fax to request either renewal or formal withdrawal of the pledge if they fail to do either within a certain period past the yearly deadline, then withdraw it if there is no response. Using those multiple contact methods, especially email, makes it unlikely they'll fall out of touch if they move.
(c.1)Find a policy company willing to gamble that the target level will not be reached within a decade, who will guarantee to cover shortfalls if the level is reached up to a certain percentage of the total. Before hiring such a company, of course, we'd have to figure whether the premiums over ten years would amount to more than the statistically likely shortfalls--based on prevalence of bankruptcy, economic cycles, demographics of the space advocate community, etc etc. This is a relatively simple actuarial question.
(c.2)Ask big-time pledgers to also pledge to cover a percentage of the shortfall, up to a maximum dollar figure of their designation.
(d)Build sponsorships. This would come later in the game, but once it became clear how serious the program was, the clamor would be tremendous. Reserve the most prominent sponsorship slots for near the end of the collection period, and auction them off.
(e)As a last-mile strategy, borrow money against the salable assets the program would create, but do so in a way careful to keep tax-exempt status. Industrial interests and other sponsors could also borrow money themselves to upgrade their sponsorship slots or buy other forms of advertisement.
(f)As a last resort, beg. I don't believe it would ever come to that, but if the people who want to see this happen were told the mission wasn't going to happen without extra help, they would step up to the plate.
2. Death
Tactfully encourage bequests among the older demographics, play up the "leaving behind a legacy that will last forever" kind of stuff. Play up to hopes for their grandkids--"You saw men walk on the Moon, your grandchildren will walk on Mars--make it happen."
2. A lot of people won't pledge with a program so vague as pledges.
The pledge system wouldn't be vague at all, it would be clearly spelled out and would inspire people to make pledges more confidently. Ask them directly for money, and they would have to evaluate the likelihood of the program ever getting all the money it needs for their contribution to be meaningful. But just ask them to pledge a certain amount in the event they do get within reach of full funding, and it's a ridiculously simple question. You're saying to them: "We are confident we'll reach our target, but we understand your position. All we ask is if this mission gets within reach, you pledge to do your part." Since funding is an even bigger obstacle than technology, you're halfway to Mars by the time you have the money.
It's the difference between angel investing and IPOs--you already know what you're dealing with before you write the checks. The whole mission plan and budget would be made available to every pledger before a single dime was collected--deviations would be inevitable, but people could be confident that those in charge knew what they were doing. Experts and professionals in the field around the world would be involved in making and commenting on those plans, and would crawl over each other to be involved in some way once they saw the funding existed.
3. What if the goal was to raise 35 billion in ten years, you have pledges for 20 billion in 10 years, you extend it five more years, in fifteen years you have 30 billion in pledges but inflation now makes the project cost estimate to be 50 billion, so you extend the project another five years, after twenty years you have 40 billion in pledges, but now the estimate is 55 billion and a quarter of the original pledgers are dead and you aren't even sure who they are and how much of the pledged money still is available. . . in short you have a mess, it isn't credible, and it collapses.
The whole question is mooted if we prominently offer the option of tying pledges to inflation, which wouldn't be that big a deal for most people, but even without that it shouldn't be a significant problem. The target figure for the mission would include projected inflation up to or beyond the target date by a certain safety margin, so that means inflation would have to outstrip the growth in pledges consistently over the entire period to build enough of a shortfall to require extending the date. And 70% across-the-board inflation over 15 years is a bit of a stretch.
But as a supplement, even while mainly focusing on pledges, you can still offer to accept cash donations and then put the cash into secure interest-bearing accounts, bills, or bonds of some kind--subject to the limitations of the tax code of course. You could also accept pledges or cash donations in the form of a percentage of yearly income or business profit rather than a dollar figure, which might appeal to some of the more fanatical advocates (like me). The different ways and forms of these pledges, donations, and collections are endless, and I'm confident that any problem could be worked around.
No, you have to have money in hand, you have to do something small and credible, you have to prove you can handle a project of a certain size, then people will give you REAL money and you do something bigger.
RobS, you can spend the next thousand years on Devon and getting to Mars won't be any more likely. Yes, we are learning important things there. Yes, the research stations are a good idea in themselves. But unless they're part of an actual mission plan to go to Mars, they don't actually contribute anything toward making that happen. Nobody who wouldn't joyously pledge for a direct Mars plan is going to change their minds because a handful of people worked some bugs out of spacesuits and hydroponics in the Arctic.
What's the incremental plan? A decade of research stations, then another decade of bigger research stations with more ambitous parameters, then maybe an unmanned satellite in LEO to test Martian gravity on rats? Forty years later, if we're lucky, we're testing Martian gravity on one person in a large spinning Bigelow module in orbit. The fact is there is no incremental plan. Neither MS nor any other organization, including NASA, actually has a plan for tying what they're doing now to a human Mars mission.
It's death by a thousand increments, and it's the exact same timidity that made NASA retreat from the Moon and rationalize Shuttle and ISS. We could have been on Mars by 1985, but NASA itself decided it would be better to incrementalize, and look what it's gotten us. With billions of dollars per year spent on increments, flying around in circles building up "credibility," I frankly think they haven't gained an inch of ground toward Mars since 1972. So the prospects of the private community taking the same route and succeeding are pretty damn slim. The only way to get there is to go there, and the real "increments" are discovered and dealt with as the preparations proceed.
Look, if NASA hasn't been to the chopping block even with its last thirty years of failure of its manned spaceflight outfit then why are they going to be doomed over the next thirty?
It's been to the chopping block countless times, and always with the same kind of "can't-do" attitude. Apollo was cancelled without the slightest incling of a new mission direction; Saturn V was cancelled without any plans to replace it with a comparably capable system; the originally envisaged Shuttle was a lot more radical than what was actually built, because NASA was no longer allowed to innovate, and what resulted was a bloated and crippled platform for maintaining the appearance of a space program.
Then we get ISS because Congress refused to fund Freedom, which meant it had to be in an inclination useless for Mars missions, and therefore abandoned the only credible reason for its existence. The first Bush asked for a study of a manned Mars mission, and NASA obligingly gave him the most expensive, most hideously complex plan they could imagine, and Congress laughed at it. And let's not forget Venture Star--which was supposed to produce totally reusable, simpler, cheaper, more efficient and safer VTHL space access, but actually produced a series of power point presentations and scale model tests leading to cancellation. NASA will never set foot on Mars, that much is a practical certainty. The only question is whether humanity in general will.
Its only 25 years to Mars probably, since by the time we are established on the Moon, we will have half the major components for Mars already (rockets, reactors, etc).
It's been "25 years to Mars probably" for the last 34 years, and it will be "25 years to Mars probably" 25 years from now. We had all the needed core technologies to begin designing the mission architecture in 1972, and a government willing to spend a lot more money on it than today. The clock only starts ticking down when people who want to get there get serious, come together and make it happen.
And you will need this money, in hand and in the bank, before you can collect on pledges.
I already explained why that wouldn't be a problem. By the time you actually got to the point of collecting, the program would be so massively famous and have so much support, obtaining the services would be trivial. Firms may work pro bono just to be associated with it, or would trade their services for prominent advertising, or a few wealthy donors would take care of the overhead. The idea that, after generating that degree of publicity, interest, and support the program would be left hanging because nobody would foot the bill for the relatively minor overhead costs is totally preposterous. That would be like getting a car loan to buy a Lexus and not being able to buy it because you can't afford the $50 registration fee.
Look at the kind of momentum something as relatively insignificant and paltry as the X Prize Foundation built up--they managed to get $10 million from Anousheh Ansari just for a prize for suborbital flights nobody believed were going to happen. That was a pledge too, and all it was about was sending spam cans past the atmosphere. I think everybody is a little tired of the "can't-do" attitude that cancels any project with real potential and laughs at things like the X-Prize. That mentality never accomplishes the really big ambitions, and never contributes anything meaningful to the efforts of others. Boiled down to its essence, your only objection to this idea is that it might not work, but you can't identify a single solid showstopper. It's just that you don't believe people want this bad enough, and frankly that's a self-fulfilling prophecy if you never try.
Foolish unwarrented optimism. Expecting a very large number of people to coordinate with your organization over a long period of time is laughable even with a little real money.
And expecting thirty years of continuous, adequate support and funding of NASA for a Mars mission to occur is rational? I'm talking about a decade, maybe less, and everyone involved would be able to keep close track of its progress. There would be no entrenched bureaucratic tail dragging the whole thing down, no political fiefdoms dictating where or which components are made, no Congressional budget hawks waiting for an excuse to pull the plug or paper-cut the mission to death, and no CYA by the people in charge of the mission. This is not only the most likely way for a Mars mission to happen, I think it's probably the only way.
They simply will not all be feverishly awaiting the magic threshold if you don't keep track of them, at the very least to remind them of their pledge.
Oh, well then, I guess we'll just have to break a $20 and keep a list of email addresses and phone numbers. Come on, you're making up problems where none exist.
Thats only a few millions of dollars over the course of about a year, Mars will probably cost 35,000 million.
Actually, it was over the course of months, and he raised it with a handful of internet volunteers. The point is that you're rejecting this idea out of hand without any frame of reference; no program of this nature, importance, excitement, or scale has ever been tried through a pledge or donation system, and you still haven't come up with a single concrete objection other than that it hasn't been done before. It's all defeatism and can't-do attitude.
Wild dreamers have always ignored little problems with zeros and decimal places
You haven't even been able to explain how this is a "wild dream," let alone rigorously explain why it shouldn't be attempted. All you're doing is a expressing a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that (a)it hasn't been done before, and (b)it's on a larger scale than current efforts. None of those are real objections, and if anything they're another reason to go for it.
Also, it would be nice if you could think up constructive criticisms instead of just saying "it's a stupid idea" in so many words. Somehow you believe people are willing to pay through taxes for incremental steps toward a mission that probably won't ever happen, but that not even a small fraction of them would make a conditional pledge to pay a tax-deductible contribution for an actual mission. I just don't see your logic, other than curmudgeonly naysaying.
problem now is avoiding derailment, and as GCNR like to point out, the long term problems with the Mars Direct Architecture.
From everything I've seen, and everything going on now, I can't conceive of NASA actually getting to Mars. Even going back to the Moon I'd call 50/50 from a purely funding standpoint, because right now they don't even have the money for that--they can only take preliminary steps and hope future administrations and Congresses will give them what they need to go.
NASA won't even set a target date for Mars, and the most they'll say is it'll be "after 2030." So, in other words, probably thirty years (if not more) of different Congresses and Presidents will have to be on board with the Mars program for it not to be cancelled or scaled back out of reach, and that's highly improbable. If we're ever to get to Mars, the people who really want to get there will just have to come together and make it happen.
The only problem will be the collection cost associated in getting the pledged amounts.
Collection, management, and other overhead costs of the fundraising would be laughable beside the total mission budget, and would be factored into the original pledge target. Services might even be donated pro bono once it became clear that the program was actually going to happen--what large company wouldn't want billions of people associating it with globally exciting events?
The simple logistics of keeping track of all those people over the many years required would require vast sums of hard cash, not more vaporous imaginary currency.
Who says anyone has to "keep track" of people? These donors want the mission to happen, they're not playing a game of ding-dong-ditch. This isn't some charity auction to impress their neighbors. They'd keep track of its progress, and would certainly hear about it in the general media long before it came close to reaching the target amount. And once it did reach target, it would be front page news all over the planet. The whole world would watch the progress of the collections, and unless they've died or become poor in the interim, the overwhelming majority of those who pledged would deliver--and in many cases, probably a lot more than they pledged.
And then you have the advertising to make people aware of such an organization in the first place, the lawyers/accountants/IT engineers needed to manage it, and real money for the other assorted requirements for an NGO/NFP of that scale.
See above about management. As for advertising, that's short-sighted and obtuse--Howard Dean's presidential campaign raised millions of dollars over the course of months through nothing more than buzz on the internet, and he was competing with three other credible primary candidates just for a chance at an election. And those were actual donations, not conditional pledges contingent on being able to field a mission. The fundraising process would be nothing more than a scaled-up and more innovative version of what MS and dozens of other space advocacy groups already do, and for a far bolder and more exciting ambition than just hosting luncheons or brow-beating Congressmen. There is no reason whatsoever this can't happen--you just need a core of dedicated people to get the ball rolling.
The means do not exsist, outside the scale of disposable reasources of present, former, and future superpower states. This cannot work, it is foolishness.
Nearly THIRTY YEARS of political and economic vicissitudes lay between today and any date NASA will even consider a Mars mission. If you don't think we can do this, then you might as well just say it can't be done at all, and nobody who's serious about opening up Mars to humans is interested in hearing that.
maybe a hybrid pledge scheme like the lifeboat guys
I couldn't find a description of their pledge scheme on their site, but even so I'm not sure it's really a valid analogy. Their program is worth supporting, but it's based on confronting very dark scenarios--and that doesn't inspire people. A manned foothold on Mars has the benefit of both increasing survival odds and inspiring people with hope, joy, and excitement for the future. It's like one guy asks for money to build a farm, and another guy asks for money to build a cemetery, whose offer inspires you?
RobS,
I think trust would be more of an issue for an entrepreneurial venture seeking investors than a grassroots effort seeking conditional pledges. Think about it. Not a single check would have to be written until people had pledged the entire projected cost, so pledgers (is that a word?) are taking no risks until the actual mission is set in motion. The more money is pledged, the more credibility the effort builds; the more credibility it has, the more professionals in the industry become interested and want to be involved, and that in turn brings in more credibility and more money.
It doesn't even really have to be the Mars Society per se that conducts the mission, but MS would be the seed of the project and its driving force--a separate organization could be created, once the money got close enough to its target, to handle the technology development and actual flight, and it would incorporate MS along with other organizations that would join along the way.
And once you have the money, corporate investors probably would look for ways to cash in as well, because nothing is as attractive as cold hard cash. Whatever deals were struck would probably involve spinoff technologies and advertising, so it wouldn't jeopardize the tax exempt status of the effort. Once it got to that stage, it would be the most exciting thing happening in the world, and you'd have to fight off the sponsors with a stick.
As to how much people want this mission, it doesn't have to be a large bloc of donors initially. If you could find just a few thousand people who are totally committed to opening the Mars frontier, you could start the snowball rolling, which is why MS is the best place to start. And they wouldn't even have to contribute the money up front like they do now, they'd only have to pledge to do their share if enough other people came aboard to bring in the needed billions.
Imagine the pledges have reached the $35 billion mark, scientists and engineers all over the world are freziedly buzzing around the project looking for ways they or their institution can be involved, and corporations are all falling over each other to profit from the excitement. Under those circumstances, would you personally feel comfortable finding a way to donate $10,000 to see that mission happen? Given the number of people who would risk their own lives for it, I can't imagine there being fewer who would donate the cost of a used car. And that's just the first step of the beginning, followed by getting slightly less dedicated people to pledge in the low thousands, the general space community to pledge in the hundreds, and perhaps the general public could make symbolic but cumulatively significant pledges.
Also, as the pledges roll in, the same people would become more confident and make their earlier pledges larger. Instead of buying an HDTV, maybe I'll add a thousand to my pledge; instead of vacationing in Hawaii, maybe I'll vacation on Catalina and pledge the difference, etc etc. You could set up rewards, distinctions, and privileges associated with different pledge levels (with greater guarantees needed for the higher ones, of course); have local, regional, national, and international pledge-raising competitions, etc etc.
It's true the effort would flounder if it began haphazardly as some kind of side project of the MS, or an amateur effort of a few members, but if the leadership came to believe in it, convinced some other organizations to at least rhetorically support the idea, and came out of the gate strong, it could work.
NASA can be useful sometimes, and on occasion achieves great things, but it is a massive Frankenstein's monster of porkbarrel fiefdoms, competing priorities, and constantly shifting political winds. The only real way to get to Mars and stay there is for people who want to get there to find out how to do it and then do it. Bob Zubrin took care of the first part, and I think this is really the only answer to the second. No amount of experience on Devon will ever make corporations more willing to fund a manned Mars mission, or make the design and execution of one significantly easier. That will only come from building an actual mission. So we just have to accept that it's very difficult, very expensive, very dangerous, and GO as soon as possible. Personally, I'm tired of waiting. I grew up listening to false promises from NASA, and now they're just making more promises. The desire exists, the means exist, the talent exists. Let's do it.
RobS,
This is a good example of what I'm talking about, how the progress of the Mars Society (or lack thereof) has begun to mirror NASA. Zubrin began the whole thing on the premise that we have the technology and know-how to get there NOW, and I believe he is correct, so smaller projects seem more like a result of frustrated ambition rather than actual progress. Obviously the Mars research stations are better than nothing, but they don't make getting there any easier or more likely, and I don't think satellites with bugs or rats in them would really do that either. It's also a question of whether MS is a frontier organization or just a Ra-Ra supporter of manned NASA missions to the Red Planet--if the former, it shouldn't shrink from taking more risks than NASA would, which means its initiatives can be more agile, cheaper, and evolve faster than Orion. Mars Direct should mean exactly that: Direct, not via analog studies and satellites, and not via NASA programs that can be killed at any time by fickle politicians. I believe it can be done.
Robert,
I know it's tempting to generalize difficulties in one context into others, but it's understandable why people wouldn't be excited enough to fund another unmanned probe. NASA sends Mars probes every two or three years, and ESA is quickly catching up, so what's the proposition? The novelty of a private group sending one just isn't much of a pitch. People who want to see humans on Mars, however, are frustrated enough with NASA to be very excited at the prospect if they're convinced it's serious and plausible.
And no, I don't think I personally could raise $35 billion alone, but I do think the Mars Society has the focus, dedication, and competence to lead a coalition of private advocacy groups that could. It wouldn't be traditional fundraising, but more like a tent revival kind of thing, where ordinary members are asked for extraordinary sacrifices (or at least pledge them) while also pursuing the big fish for larger sums. Through clever marketing, the general public could get excited about it and send in pocket change that would add up over time. The variations are endless.
There are thousands of people right now who would sell everything they own just for the chance to risk their own lives on Mars, so I don't think getting them to part with that money to pave the way would be as difficult as you think. People cared about getting to the New World enough to sell themselves into indentured servitude for seven years, and that was just a new continent on the other side of a relatively small ocean. But if even core advocates of human expansion to Mars don't care enough to say "Yes, if you get enough pledges for full funding, I pledge 10% of my yearly income for ten years to this mission," then it doesn't say much for mankind's future on Mars.
All things considered, I don't believe NASA will ever be allowed to get there, much less stay there if they did, and Mike Griffin won't be in control much longer to keep the pressure on. Griffin's successors will likely be the same group of bean counters and museum curators that made up his immediate predecessors, and they will take the path of least resistance straight to nowhere. If humanity is to get to Mars, then the people who most badly want to get there will have to do the heavy lifting.
As to your point about needing to shake out the equipment, just include that in the cost of the mission and sell the whole package as the manned Mars project. Don't break it down into little pieces and then futilely try to get funding for incremental steps that don't excite very many people on their own. The added cost of regional Mars research stations and the satellites you're talking about would add negligible marginal cost to the whole venture.
GCNRevenger,
The $35 billion price tag is after inflation. The original was $20 billion when the study was originally done, and in-depth cost analysis by the NASA bean counters found Zubrin's numbers highly accurate. As to "giggle factor," what do you think the vast majority of people already think of the Mars Society, if they even know it exists? A bunch of space geeks with too much time on their hands fantasizing about Buck Rogers adventures.
You don't have to convince anyone who isn't already on board with the mission, you just have to whip up dedicated advocates into an enthusiastic frenzy and credibility would grow with the pledges. Any snide newspaper columnist who laughed at the project at first would get an attitude readjustment when it passed the $1 billion mark. And obviously the money wouldn't be handled through MS, it would be through some large financial services firm, and people would have the complete mission and budget plan in their hands before they were asked for their money.
You say it can't be relied upon that people would have a few thousand dollars when it came time to collect, and yet they'd have a couple of years to watch the pledges build toward the critical amount and know they'd need to plan for paying it. These people want the mission, they're not just saying they'll pay as some kind of prank, and they will make sure they have the money if possible. Richer donors could also pledge to make up a percentage of any shortfall in collections.
Mars is out there for the taking. How much do you want it?
Mars Direct (if I'm not mistaken) was projected to cost $35 billion, so I'm wondering why the Mars Society doesn't go about raising that privately right now. For instance, as an extreme case, imagine MS managed to convince 3.5 million people to pledge $1,000 per year over ten years to a manned Mars mission--that's less than a car payment. And with some donors giving far more, the number of people who'd need to participate could actually be a lot smaller: Every millionaire who pledged 100k per year would reduce the need to convince 99 other people, and there would be a few super-rich folks who might pledge 1 or even 10 million.
Now, ordinarily even dedicated space advocates are reserved with their money when all that's being offered is more power point presentations, more luncheons, more political activism, but I think that would dramatically change if they knew the money would be going directly to a human Mars mission. Furthermore, the pledges wouldn't even be collected until the cumulative totals reached full funding level, so they would risk nothing in the interim. Heck, if they originally under-pledged out of skepticism, some might substantially increase their pledges once it becomes clear the mission is really going to happen. And since the costs of Mars Direct were computed as a NASA mission, it's entirely plausible that a private version would be substantially cheaper.
I know you guys are smart and know what you're doing, but for the life of me I can't figure out why this approach hasn't taken hold in the Mars Society. I'm not rich, but I'd gladly pledge a quarter of my yearly income for ten years to see mankind get to Mars. And I know there are plenty of others who would too, and a LOT more who would give a thousand instead of buying a plasma TV. And once you pull off something like that and prove it can be done, it can happen again and again, with larger and more ambitious missions made possible by the institutional investors who'd become convinced. Then you'd see a frontier opening up, not just a sterile government outpust that could be abandoned at any time by the politicians. Any reason we can't start doing this RIGHT NOW?
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