He says $500,000 but that is just transport cost. Bear in mind that it costs around $10 million to make a spacesuit - and they don’t last for ever. How much does a spacesuit cost? What’s the good being on Mars without a spacesuit?
NASA’s Released a Prototype of the Spacesuit Astronauts Will Wear on Mars - judging by present day spacesuits then, not including the design costs, expect it to cost around $10 million per astronaut just to make the thing. It’s like a miniature spaceship with lots of parts to be carefully assembled, which takes months for each suit. His $500,000 is just transport and can’t possibly include the cost of a spacesuit or of your habitat on Mars or life support system or consumables.
What about the habitat? What about life support? Life support is not just like an aqualung with an endless supply of oxygen. It’s a complex system with many parts of it that has to remove numerous harmful gases, like hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide etc, keep humidity and temperature, pressure right, scrub carbon dioxide etc. You can never open your window to get a breath of fresh air - “sick building syndrome to the nth degree” without lots of sophisticated equipment. How do you repair all those things things when they go wrong? And you’ve sold your house on Earth but you need a much more expensive house on Mars, with protection from cosmic radiation, ability to hold in ten tons per square meter of atmosphere, is he going to buy free houses for all the colonists on Mars?
And your habitat probably has to be replaced every few decades (to judge by the ISS) and your spacesuit likewise.
The idea that you could sell your house to pay for your transport cost to Mars and somehow survive there is absurd. Remember all the money from the sale of your house has been blown on the transport costs to Mars.
And paying for it all by sale of intellectual property - things you invent while you are on Mars - that’s his only income revenue for Mars colonists. How could that work? You have to pay for intellectual property from Earth, for all of our inventions that you need to survive, and it’s surely going to be a huge imbalance that way.
It’s based on a false analogy with the American settlers. That it’s a habitable place - no it isn’t. Vacuum for an atmosphere, moisture of your lungs would boil so you couldn’t even breathe with an oxygen mask, need full body bodysuit, cold, as in so cold that carbon dioxide (dry ice) freezes out of the air as morning frosts for 100 days of the two year Martian year even in the tropics, dry, okay maybe ice that you can melt out of the ground, but no liquid water except a few thin films of very salty brine, no air to breathe, it’s nothing like settling the US.
Which not only was habitable, it already had inhabitants. Food growing in the ground already. Trees. You could just sleep out of doors if necessary, walk anywhere without a spacesuit. Water to drink. How is that like Mars?
Does he expect them to be able to build log cabins on Mars? Using native timber?
Imagine the driest most inhospitable cold desert on Earth. Elevate it to several times the height of Everest. Remove all oxygen from the air and replace with CO2 which is poisonous to humans above 1% in the atmosphere and is usually a problem gas to get rid of in space habitats. You have some ice in the ground and the ground itself, with its stones and boulders. That’s it. No vegetation. No running water. You can’t breathe the air. Now live there.
That’s still more hospitable than Mars (no global dust storms, Earth’s magnetosphere for extra protection from solar storms, more sunlight because you are closer to the Sun), and if such a place existed, you could get there in hours instead of only getting there every two years in a six months long yourney.
There are lots of other reasons for not colonizing Mars in the near future, and most especially for me, the planetary protection issues.
But economically it’s not going to be something you can do any time soon anyway unless you are a multibillionaire, and even then, questionable. Unless your aim is just to get there and die on Mars.
See also my Ten Reasons NOT To Live On Mars - Great Place To Explore
About the Author
