Mars One

[Tinadrin Chelnor]

I believe this should go here. What do you guys think about this project? Completely private with no political alignments. I believe the next steps in the Space Age will be led by private groups. This is one of the better ideas I have come across thus far. I am cautiously optimistic.

http://mars-one.com/en/about-mars-one/about-mars-one

[Teaos]

I agree the next step is private sector in space. But I personally think we are a long long way away from that. The organizations that exist now are just getting into space. Next step they have planned is mining asteroids. Maybe a space hotel. Then maybe the moon. Then maybe Mars. I would be amazed if they got to mars with in 50 years.

[GrahamKennedy]

I am for anything that gets more people or hardware into space. And there's definitely a market for businesses in launching satellites and stuff, without government subsidy.

But I honestly can't see that private industry would want to invest in manned space flight or deep space exploration as anything but a sideshow. Tourism for the obscenely wealthy may become tourism for the merely very wealthy, but there just aren't going to be holidays for the middle class in space anytime soon (soon being within, say, fifty years).

And what else is there? Mining asteroids sounds lovely, but is there really anything on the asteroids we need that we don't have here on Earth? Asteroids are mostly iron, aren't they? We're not exactly short of iron, and it costs about $120 per ton right here on Earth. Mining a ton from an asteroid and returning it to Earth would cost hundreds of millions, if not billions. Does anybody seriously believe that we're going to see the cost of spaceflight come down a millionfold anytime soon?

I hate to say it because I grew up on Heinlein's "Rolling Stones", where a family who grew up on the moon could buy their own rocket and fly off to the Mars colonies and then on to the asteroid belt community. I wish we could have that world, but sadly I think it will still be a dream for a good long time to come.

[Teaos]

The rational I hear about mining asteroids is not so we bring it down to earth but to build things up there. Save the energy getting things off earth. Simply mining a ice ball would save billions from not having to take up water.

[Mikey]

We're a long way from even the theoretical spaceborne infrastructure for that. Like GK, I'm all for anything that keeps us going back into space; the problem I foresee with private enterprise leading the charge is that it is, well... private enterprise. That means that gone will be the days of exploring space in order to see what we can learn; to sate the spirit of exploration; to make advances which can be shared across the globe; even just in order to sate national pride and to beat those damn Russkies to the moon. Incoming will be the days in which space exploration will only be conducted for a specific, quantifiable fiscal goal; and failing that, any given essay into space will be cancelled by the sales and margin projections or the bottom lines on a P&L sheet.

[Teaos]

Thats where NASA comes in. They stop being their own space programme and instead just offer multi billion dollar grants to do science missions.