Does Spacex $200K Ticket Include Colony Materials?

[Eclipse Now]

I can't see anything about how Space X will finance the setting up of the colony. Does $200k per ticket include the 'luggage' like.... habitats? Greenhouses to grow food? A couple years of freeze dried noodles and protein bars, etc? Is it $200k per person of a certain average weight, and then $200k for any luggage of the same weight?

[CraigD]

This is the first I’ve heard of Musks’s US$200,000/colonist private funding scheme, but from a quick read of this high search ranking article, I gather the $200,000 goes toward a common fund to assure a successful 1,000,000 person Mars colonization mission, which would necessarily include everything needed to assure that success.

 

It’s not really a $200,000 “ticket” plan like an airline ticket, but a $200,000 share in a company, similar to the way North America was colonized by European companies in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Like those companies, I imagine a few wealthy people could invest multiples of $20,000,000 to send 100s of employee-colonists to further their interests and influence in the Mars’ exploitation and influence in its government.

 

Private investment funded Mars colonization schemes aren’t new, but Musk’s stands out as many times bigger than many. Bas Lansdorp’s Mars One plan, for example, proposes to settle 20 people on Mars by 2035, and get much of its funding from intellectual properties and revenue from broadcasting the colonist’s adventures as a reality TV show.

 

Plans like Musk’s and Lansdorp’s have in common that the assertion that a small (compared to the wealthy world’s total population) company of people willing to invest essentially everything they have could fund a space program more expensive than any previously funded by a government, and draw on the history of this having been done for terrestrial colonization enterprises centuries ago to further their plausibility.

 

It’ll be interesting to see how these business schemes play out. It’s a wonderful time to be alive!

[Eclipse Now]

Interesting perspective! And interesting time indeed! Yes, people living on Mars sometime in the 2020's! I'm in my late 40's, and this is the stuff I've been waiting for my whole life!

[Brownsfan77]

That's easy money, make you think your going to mars and in reality your in the desert somewhere on earth.

[pzkpfw]

That's easy money, make you think your going to mars and in reality your in the desert somewhere on earth.

What fool wouldn't know they're on Earth?

 

- Sun (apparent size and heat).

- Atmosphere (Oxygen levels, temperature).

- Surface gravity.

- Clouds.

- Moon.