Who wouldn’t want to go to Mars? It is a school child’s dream. A very costly dream. The current interest rate regime means that large funds can be borrowed for practically nothing, making previously crazy investments seem somewhat sane. The basic logic of a loan is that the borrower has the potential income stream to repay the principal plus interest.

Mars One want to fund the one-way trip to the red planet with sponsorship, tent pole donors, and selling the rights to a Big Brother in Space type reality show. That’s all fine but given the time scale of the plans, its highly likely the current financial climate of near zero interest rates may return to average levels of 4-5%, and suddenly shooting a dozen nutters into the Van Allen radiation belt, through space for 210 days to Mars might not seem like such a good investment.

That said, there are a lot of very rich, very odd people out there, who might just pony up 100 million or so each just to see people wandering around on Mars. The economics of a revenue-generating mission are fairly poor, even using the Olympics based model.

We want heroes and we want grand adventures. We just don’t have the tax revenues to pay for them anymore. But corporations and the 0.001% do. The Mission to the Moon of the 1950s and 1960s shaped a generation. Some guy jumping out of a balloon to sell awful-tasting fizzy drinks just doesn’t compare, but he got some interesting science done. A Mars mission paid for by the private sector and philanthropy might actually work. The current business model just doesn’t. So my advice: start searching for the crazy rich.  

Dr. Stephen Kinsella, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Limerick.