What I'm interested to know, is what's in it for both companies - besides notoriety?
It's going to cost billions to reach Mars, and more billions to develop things to a "good enough" point to actually make the round trip feasible - and so far, at least to my knowledge, we've found nothing of enough value to make trips there economically viable for a for-profit corporation.
Sure, they'll get government contracts, but that doesn't pay for the first trip there (which appears will be entirely on their own/investors dime).
There aren't massive gold or platinum deposits we've found - and even if there were, surely it would be difficult to extract and recover due to mass.
I firmly believe Musk is totally willing to bankrupt his company (and himself) to achieve his goal of landing on Mars, but are his investors? What about Boeing and Lockheed Martin (ULA)?
At least with a government landing on Mars, you can expect science to be conducted. What does a for-profit company do there, when there's not much to make a profit from?
What's the end-game here? We land and say "we did it!"... then what?
It's going to cost billions to reach Mars, and more billions to develop things to a "good enough" point to actually make the round trip feasible - and so far, at least to my knowledge, we've found nothing of enough value to make trips there economically viable for a for-profit corporation.
Sure, they'll get government contracts, but that doesn't pay for the first trip there (which appears will be entirely on their own/investors dime).
There aren't massive gold or platinum deposits we've found - and even if there were, surely it would be difficult to extract and recover due to mass.
I firmly believe Musk is totally willing to bankrupt his company (and himself) to achieve his goal of landing on Mars, but are his investors? What about Boeing and Lockheed Martin (ULA)?
At least with a government landing on Mars, you can expect science to be conducted. What does a for-profit company do there, when there's not much to make a profit from?
What's the end-game here? We land and say "we did it!"... then what?