Economics

The opponents of investing in Mars colonisation generally begin by an attack on the economic front. It is a waste of money and cannot be economically viable runs the argument. But just stating the case does not make it true. Even were no profits earned by colonising Mars it would still be ecomomically worthwhile in terms of GDP growth in America particularly. The employment and economic activity generated would be substantial and continuing.

Take GDP: who are the heroes behind the vast US economy? Auto workers, movie makers, high tech factory workers, or perhaps those in Silicon Valley? Answer of course all the above. But if you really want to add to GDP growth take the man dying in hospital with cancer who is contesting a divorce and trying to prevent his wife inheriting his money. Add his multi-million law suit against the tobacco companies whom he blames for his lung cancer. This man is a true economic powerhouse due to the peculiarities of GDP and growth measurement. Nothing in what he is doing may appear productive on the surface. But his vast expenditure on legal and medical bills all add to GDP.

This may just seem a bit bizarre, but it is nonetheless true that setting up a Mars colony will help significantly to stimulate, primarily, the US economy and its GDP. In turn, the rest of the world will benefit from the knock on effects of American growth. And all this does not have to increase the burden on long-suffering (again principally American) taxpayers. Private enterprise wants to go to Mars. It instinctively smells an opportunity for future growth, market dominance, and ultimately profit. Would the tax funded NASA play no part? Of course it would. But there would be no need to increase its budget and there might be opportunities to rein that colossal tax drain in over time. In the Space X Dragon program there is a developable architecture for deep space flight operations. It would be relatively cheap to build on Dragon and on Space X's planned heavy lift and reusable rocket technology to do the same things NASA is spending so many billions on in redundantly developing the Orion spacecraft and the SLS launch system.

Axing Orion etc and switching some funding to the development of commercial deep space capacity would speed up development substantially and bring costs down dramatically. Just look at what the private sector has achieved already in developing resupply capacity for the International Space Station. Commercial flights may be taking crews to the station before NASA has even launched the first unmanned Orion. NASA's role could be redirected to research and development and helping the private sector work up the constituent machinery and technology to turn its existing work on deep space capacity and habitat development into a fully worked up set of tools and hardware to make a Mars colony practicable.

So how would a Mars colony be funded in detail? There are plenty of inspired ideas out there already, and many more waiting to be developed. I will leave that as the subject of a future post.