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About Sell-Mars

May 17, 2005

Thirty years ago this week, Gene Cernan took the dubious distinction of becoming the last man to have walked on another world. He and geologist Harrison Schmitt (The first and last Scientist on another world) ascended from the moons dusty surface with the realistic belief that while this was the last Apollo mission, men would soon ultimately return to exploring the planets.

Mars was the obvious next step. After the Earth, it’s probably the most likely place to find life in the solar system, and has all the resources needed to support long term human habitation. So where did we go wrong? How can we be stuck in low Earth orbit thirty years after landing on the moon?

We have the technology to go to Mars. That much is certain. When JFK, in the early sixties, declared that the US should go to the moon, no American had ever actually been in orbit! Today, going to Mars isn’t as daunting as the moon seemed in the sixties. We know all we need to send people there, and we’ve had thirty years to establish, at least on paper, a plan to do just that.

Mission plans, such as Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct, show us how to utilize the Martian atmosphere to produce fuel, cutting down dramatically the size and complexity of a mission, while actually increasing the safety and productiveness of the journey. In ‘The Case For Mars’, Zubrin shows us that there is nothing holding us back from the red planet. All the technological issues have been solved. We are ready to take the Martian challenge.

The quote, ‘No Bucks, No Buck Rogers’, was coined at the beginning of the space age, and even today it remains true. The only thing stopping a manned mission to Mars is simply the money required to do so. A Mars Direct style mission was estimated to cost twenty to thirty billion dollars for a government or less then five if a private company makes the attempt. Neither sum is a small amount of money, and the obvious reason that no one has actually gone to Mars so far is because there will be little initial return on this investment.

But what if there is another way. What if we can make going to Mars a profitable venture?

I believe we can make Mars a profitable venture and so I have founded a proprietorship known as Sell-Mars. We are an organization established to administrate the sale, marketing, and ultimate colonization of Mars and to promote private research groups which will make life on the harsh planet even more easy.

In the past month we realized that If the planet were sold for $25 an acre, it would be worth atleast, if not more then, 1375 billion dollars.

However, Sell-Mars is not just a cosmic estate agent, we are now operating in many industrys. We now sell Mars rocks, Mars dust, Mars images, and the rights to name a photographed topographical feature of Mars.

Sell-Mars also deals with countries, we'll plant your flag in the Martian soil if you can't afford your own mission. If your country might like to send its own astronauts and scientists to Mars, simply sponsor them for five million each and we will find a way to get them there.

But of course we don’t own Mars and now your probably thinking that this is some sort of scam and that this organization would have to land there in order to have any sort of claim.  How can we sell you land and Mars rocks before we get there?

Which came first the chicken or the egg?

The only way to pull this off is with a little faith. Yes, this is the catch. People must buy the land and rocks before we even launch the first vessel. Most of you at this point are screaming scam, there’s no way we could guarantee the investors money, and this is true. We may never raise enough money, or our mode of transportation could malfunction on the pad, and so we can never actually give people a 100% guarantee that the money they send us would return as Mars rocks, or a legitimate land deed. But we will go partway to satisfying your concerns.

For example, say you want to risk it and be a part of Sell-Mars. If you buy an acre of land (It’s only $25 so hopefully you’re not particularly worried if the whole thing fails), your money, along with everyone else’s is deposited into a secure bank account where the money just sits and waits. You see, Sell-Mars guarantees that it will not use your money which you've invested until we have 100 million dollars in our bank account. The interest from that money will be used to snowball the whole scheme. Until the bank account has one hundred million dollars within it, your $10 isn’t touched, this is a guarantee.

Now, your probably thinking that two things can happen here. The first is that we never reach our goal because no one in the world is interested enough to spend a few dollars on a crazy scheme. Colonizing a whole planet just isn’t a priority for us as a species because we would rather watch television and eat freezed dried pizzas and so the whole project is cancelled, in which case we guarantee that the money you gave us will be returned to you.

But say for example people are interested in going to Mars and developing new means of propulsion. Say the world gets inspired by this, and wonders if we really can do such a thing. If the money gets past the cut off point, your $10 is ours and it’s committed to Mars.

With the money we plan to have a select crew of specialists in multiple fields sent to Mars in a custom made spacecraft developed by StarDrive Engineering. After the vessel is developed and tested we will set out for Mars to claim the planet for all the people of the Earth, to be administered at first by the Sell-Mars organization.

There will probably be three to four exploration related missions to Mars after the first, but after these the program will change slightly. Instead of returning the astronauts home, the next visitors to Mars will stay there, and begin the establishment of a new civilization.

After the initial exploration missions, people will be able to purchase a one way ticket to live on Mars. With our hardware being mass produced, alot of money, and a cycling space craft traveling to and fro between the Earth and Mars, the first colonist’s will probably pay around a million dollars for the journey. While that’s not a sum of money that most people could afford, the majority of the first colonists will be scientists and engineers who could be sponsored by universities and other organizations to conduct legitimate scientific work within our bases.

At this point in the colonization, the Sell-Mars organization would make a small profit of each ticket sold. This money would be reinvested back into space, for whatever scheme seemed appropriate at the time. It may be a new cheaper launch vehicle to be used as a method of transportation and an area for research. In this way, our expansion into space would be a continuous event, and we should never again fall back to the cradle of Earth, as we did after Apollo.

My grandfather, like so many of our ancestors, traveled from the old world, to the new. The journey for him was comfortable, but many people who took the journey a hundred years ago had a harder time. The trip took six months, with poor food and cramped conditions, but the goal was worth the discomfort. By leaving the old world, they were starting again, a fresh start in a new place with unexplored lands to be utilized and new societies to be created. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States were all colonized from the old world, and now rank among the leaders in wealth and living conditions. The reasons are simple: a new colony must at first struggle to survive, but this struggle leads to ingenuity and progress. A new colony must be flexible and inventive to cope with the demands of a developing nation, leading to modern views of government, and society.

This trend can be seen throughout history. From humble beginnings, along a thin strip of vegetation in Kenya, Homo sapiens has spread throughout the world. Our constant struggle with this expansion has evolved us into intelligent and self-aware creatures. But a new frontier was available for our forefathers. My generation does not have that option.

We are the first generation without a frontier.

The task of opening up the new frontier is ours. We are the first generation without a frontier, but we can still remember what that means. We still have some of the drive that pushes us to explore, to expand. If we leave this to our children we run the risk of them having forgotten the frontier sprit. We risk them always passing the challenge on to the next generation. We risk cloning generations of apathetic explorers, eager to discover in theory but never in practice.

Mars is there for all humanity, but it is all of us who must be there for Mars.