I'm curious why people think it will happen in the private sector first. Is there some applied science, resource, tourism, or other value to be had?

We haven't seen a private sector moon landing yet (it's been 50 years since NASA did it) simply because there isn't much market value in putting a person on the moon. So why Mars?

I suppose because Elon Musk wants to go there, and he seems good at getting stuff done.

This comment really sums up the cult of personality that's grown up around Musk.

The world needs more Musk fanboys and less Beliebers, thank you very much.

The world needs more critical thinking, and less judging.

The kind of mind that can produce such a false dichotomy.

You think the organization that landed man on the moon and rovers on mars can't get stuff done?

Today's NASA has little in common with the organization that put men on the Moon, but they can put rovers on Mars so they have some ability to get stuff done.

Building a better car has an expected return on investment.

So far nobody is able to come up with a way to recoup the many hundreds of millions of dollars it will cost to get humans to Mars and back.

Q: "Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?" - unknown

A: "Because it's there" - George Mallory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory)

That's not a reason, that's a trite saying.

Many great voyages of exploration were privately financed, often by newspapers who got exclusive story rights in exchange.

Considering all the money corporations spend on marketing to create goodwill, I'm surprised none have financed a space probe for goodwill purposes.

> So far nobody

Well...Elon has made guesses/estimates/given us lots of ideas about his monetization strategy. I think the most promising is to sell tickets at $500,000 apiece, which he thinks will be about the going market price to meet a demand of ~100,000 colonists.

Mars One thinks they can do it on a TV show (they'll fail, though, obviously).

My point is that your "nobody" comment is unfair and incorrect. Lots of intelligent, capable and experienced people have articulated a number of different business models around the colonization of Mars. None of them are proven, of course, but that will take time.

It's entirely possible that Elon Musk doesn't care about recouping his investment in SpaceX. It seems like the end goal of the company is to start a colony on Mars so he can go live there.

Curing malaria also doesn't have a return on investment to whoever is doing it. We're at the point where governments are doing the neccessary things, but private individuals are able to sponsor the visionary but less practical endeavors - simply because they believe that it's the right thing to do and don't have to answer to millions of voters who might quite rationally prefer more bread and circuses instead.

> So far nobody is able to come up with a way to recoup the many hundreds of millions of dollars it will cost to get humans to Mars and back.

Have you seen the price of "sovereign" islands lately? Say what you want about the validity and enforceability of the claim (and the sanity of the people who buy them), but land separated from any Earth government by ~55 million km+ doesn't seem like it would be a hard sell at any price.

The private sector will be selling the trips to Mars because they will make money.

The people buying the trips will not be making money. It will be consumption, not investment.

I doubt it, the private sector only innovates if there's enough & immediate enough profit on the line. Even the libertarian darling SpaceX is just piggybacking off the research and hard work of the public sector (ie, NASA's work in the 50's -> 80's)

Because private-sector corporations never have problems with every manager wanting to add something to justify his/her budget and existence, resulting in a bloated over-budget under-delivered project.

Upside: you could end up owning your own goddamn planet!

Downside: you can't do anything with it.

You're not going to make the staggering costs back in space tourism, notwithstanding geeks' relatively high risk tolerance; you need the possibility of some self-sustaining economic activity.