Space travel is one of those rare endeavors where people from all over the world seem to join together without thought of individual accolades or personal gain of any sort. But could that all be about to change?
On Monday, Space.com ran a pair of related stories, one of which suggested that there was a “strong” possibility that the first commercial space stations will be built within the next decade, and another indicating that officials with the Mars One project are attempting to solicit funding from billionaires, possibly in exchange for naming rights to the proposed colony.
As the website explained, the transition over to commercial space stations is one that is being directly overseen by NASA, as the US space agency looks to transition away from government operated facilities such as the International Space Station in the future. Instead of building new orbiting bases after the ISS is retired in 2024, it is turning to the private sector to do so.
Commercial firms are already using the space station for experiments, research, and to launch tiny probes known as cubesats, and once private industry begins creating platforms for additional types of activities, NASA will completely offload those tasks to third parties, the agency said. It has no plans to become “an anchor tenant” to a commercial space station, Space.com said.
Mars One mission counting on billionaire benefactor?
Meanwhile, a separate story published by the website explained that the Netherlands-based Mars One project is looking for some financial assistance as it tries to establish a permanent colony on the Red Planet. As such, it is hoping to hear from a wealthy investor interested in sponsoring the nonprofit’s endeavors by contributing in exchange for naming rights to the settlement.
Mars One “is so ambitious and – I think ‘crazy’ is the right word – that we might actually get a phone call from a billionaire who says, ‘I want to make this happen,” co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp told Space.com. “I want the first city on Mars to be called Gatesville or Slim City,” a reference to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim Helu.
Lansdorp made those comments earlier this month at the 18th annual International MarsSociety Convention in Washington DC. The organization’s plans, starting with the launching of a lander and an orbiting communications satellite in 2020 and culminating with a manned mission to set up the colony in 2027, will cost an estimated $6 billion – possibly even more, experts argue.
Furthermore, the long-term goal is to launch new four-person crews to Mars every two years to build up the extraterrestrial settlement, at an estimated cost of about $4 billion per voyage to the Red Planet. Add in inflation, and MIT graduate students Andrew Owen and Sydney Do said that they believed that the costs would become unsustainable over time.
To help cover the cost of the mission, Lansdorp has floated the idea of recruiting a billionaire to contribute to the campaign. While he emphasized that Mars One isn’t simply waiting around for a white knight with a blank check to show up, he told Space.com that it would be a “positive surprise” to have a benefactor sponsoring the project.
(Image: An artist’s concept depicting a Boeing CST-100 spacecraft approaching a private inflatable space station. Credit: Boeing)
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