Looks like the Mars Homestead guys have started a startup.
It may seem a bit premature to be planning for this kind of thing now, what with even the as-yet-potential Mars missions under the VSE not scheduled for at least another twenty years, but you just never know what the emerging private space industry might do in the meantime.
What makes me skeptical about this is that it involves some of the same hyper-planners I was complaining about a couple of weeks back. Sure, there may eventually be a market for sending materials from Mars back to orbital stations and lunar colonies, but that seems much further off even than the proposed NASA Mars missions…there must first be orbital stations and lunar colonies to ship those items back to, and transportation costs must be such that materials from Mars beat out alternatives from elsewhere. (Perhaps they cover their business plan in more detail at their website, but I wouldn’t know because the site won’t let you in without Flash enabled.)
And while the holistic planning and business model have me skeptical, this has me shaking my head:
It will be many years before 4Frontiers is mining Mars and doling out mineral rights to Martian prospectors. So the company has several moneymaking schemes for the near term.
One plan is to build a full-scale version of the planned Mars settlement and charge visitors to tour the “Mars Settlement Research and Outreach Center.” 4Frontiers hopes to have a site selected for the center by the end of this year, said company co-founder and CEO Mark Homnick.
“We’ve narrowed the search to New Mexico, Central Florida or Colorado,” he said.
Never mind the notion that this venture will be “doling out mineral rights” it doesn’t have a legal claim to, the “theme park” idea seems corny in the extreme…sorta like these guys.