New company hopes to create settlement on Mars

• 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.