Summary
A company called 4Frontiers is hoping to settle the red planet in the next twenty years or so, having already raised a few million for the venture.
Original source:
http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,68898,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_9
Details
CEO Mark Homnick, a former manager for Intel who has registered 4Frontiers in Florida, says he has already raised "a couple million" from people he won't name.
Homnick and his co-founders -- a longtime Mars aficionado named Bruce Mackenzie and a 25-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology master's student, Joseph Palaia -- are ready with several answers.
First, they contend, humankind needs a new frontier to explore, with all the intellectual and engineering challenges that homesteading Mars would present.
Will we meet an early end at the hands of an asteroid, warfare, disease or some other catastrophe?
In that case, we'd sure be glad civilization had been preserved by some colonists on Mars -- and perhaps elsewhere in the galaxy, if all goes well on the Red Planet.
That broader vision of space settlement gives 4Frontiers its name: the frontiers being the Earth, the moon, Mars and the asteroids.
"It's the nature of life -- life tries to expand and tries to adapt," Mackenzie says.
"If there's a forest fire in one valley, then all of the organisms in the next valley will slowly creep over the ridge and repopulate that valley.
Space Adventures of Arlington, Virginia, has brokered $20 million trips for the wealthy on Russian rockets and is taking deposits for $100 million fly-bys of the far side of the moon.
For a lot less money, you can sign up for a quick blast into zero gravity.
Homnick says 4Frontiers would probably "stay incremental" through the early 2010s, perhaps getting involved in robotic surveys of
Mars or asteroid mining.
While that's not exactly the traditional language of private enterprise, some space scholars say it leaves room for commercial projects.
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Sunday, October 23, 2005
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