One tempting way around this is to leverage the future value of land to try to fund the present. For example, Mars has about 35 billion acres on it. If this could be sold at an average of $100/acre, we'd be looking at 3.5 trillion dollars - more than enough to finance several manned missions.
But - in order for land to be sold, someone has to own it - and no one currently owns any part of Mars. [No one currently ownes any part of the Moon either, but so far that hasn't stopped several companies from selling pieces of it!]
Mars is too important for us to get wrong, and the Moon may already have ownership under dispute (not question, dispute!). We could instead start practicing with something less important; the asteroids leap to mind.
Ceres - the largest asteroid in the main belt - is about 600 miles in diameter, and has a surface area of four million square miles, or over two and a half billion acres. If this land were sold at $30/acre, we'd have over 20 billion dollars - easily enough to fund a Ceres Orbiter mission, similar to Mars Global Surveyor, that would go in polar orbit around Ceres and eventually produce hi-res coutour maps of the entire surface.
If the Ceres orbiter were contracted out on a bid basis, and payment was made after a successful trip - we'd be paying only for results. We could contract for 2 Ceres orbiters, at 1.5 billion each.
I'd like to see a next step of a Ceres tether, allowing us to put things from an Earth->Ceres trajectory to the surface without rocket propellant..
Obviously, the hard part would be getting the funding and land ownership model right. Here are the steps we need:
- Get agreement from USA, ESA, Russia, China, India, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and maybe other countries (Canada? Brazil?South Korea? etc?) that the land on Ceres is ownable, and currently under control of the Ceres Land Authority (CLA) - a multinational public-interest group chartered with brokering the sale of the land. The signatories need to agree to the ownership and agree not to recognize or allow business from/with any group that violates the ownership rights.
- The CLA offers the land for sale, skimming a percent off the top for expenses. The bulk of the revenue is placed in a publically-visible fund, and when the amount in the account exceeds the cost of the current highest-priority Ceres mission, the mission is funded on a bid/cash basis, and is awarded after a successful trip
- Up to 30% of the money in the CLA fund could be used as incentives to various governments initially reluctant to sign the treaty. This should be an easy sell - the hard part will be getting the USA, ESA, Russia, and China on board. Once they are - we say "Hey - would you like some free money?" to any other country we'd like to have on the list.
- Maximum of
may be owned by any one country. Once all the land is sold, acres may be bought and sold on the free market, through the CLA, with the CLA skimming 2% for every transaction. - Maximum of 1000 acres may be owned by any one person. We want many land-owners, not few.
We could say that 20% of Ceres is non-ownable. If a colonization misson happens, a region of several hundred acres centered around the First Landing site automatically becomes part of this 20%, with displaced landowners getting title to new land on a 2:1 basis.
If this is successful on Ceres, we could adopt a similar scheme for the Moon and Mars - two much more important destinations. If we are successful in getting the major spacefaring nations to agree to a private land ownership treaty, we could pull the same trick as we used with Ceres.
Dave Boll, astrofísico
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