CREATIVE FINANCING
For all the tax dollars the federal government squanders on pork-barrel military and highway projects, it's a shame the Feds can't come up with money for cool stuff like a serious hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence or a manned mission to Mars. Maybe it's a lack of Beltway connections or high-powered lobbyists, but endeavors like these stand little chance of getting funding in today's political climate. Big dreamers need a way to raise government-scale moola without recourse to the public teat.
The Mars Society has an idea. Among the topics the group will discuss at its annual meeting this month in Boulder, Colorado, are alternate ways of financing a trip to the fourth rock. The most intriguing of the various proposals is an online Mars lottery. Players would plunk down $5 or so, with the chance of winning Mars-themed trinkets or small cash payouts. The grand prize? An 18-month holiday on the surface of the Red Planet itself, financed by proceeds from the lottery. Mars Society president Robert Zubrin estimates a bare-bones mission will cost at least $10 billion.
Zubrin envisions the journey happening in a series of steps, beginning next summer with the creation of a $1 million Mars training base on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. The base, which will test living conditions in an extremely cold and dry environment, is being funded entirely through private donations. Infoseek founder Steve Kirsch and the Foundation for the International Non-Government Development of Space have each chipped in $100,000.
The next step might be paying NASA to carry a Mars Society payload - perhaps a camera-equipped balloon - on an upcoming Mars probe, due to be launched in 2003. If all goes well, the final step would be a full-fledged six-person mission to Mars: estimated blastoff 2019.
Of course, this plan faces a few obstacles, not the least of which is the law. The National Association of Attorneys General has been leading an effort to get Congress to ban online gambling, including lotteries, meaning that any would-be US Marsnauts would have to be scofflaws as well.
More troublesome is the timetable. The International Red Cross' Plus Lotto, the game on which the Mars Lottery is loosely based, generates about 6,000 Swiss francs a week - $4,000. At that rate it would take more than 48,000 years for the Mars Society to raise $10 billion.
The Mars Society: www.marssociety.org.
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