If you are a billionaire, ideally a decabillionaire, pondering your legacy, I have a proposition and a question for you. The proposition is immortal glory for you (plus, as a potential spinoff, the survival of humanity). The question is: How many rich people are still admired five centuries after their death for what they did with their money?\
This is a once-in-a-planet’s-lifetime opportunity to win eternal renown — and perform a lasting public service that won’t be done anytime soon by any public agency. Politicians are understandably leery of a Mars mission, and not only because the payoff would come decades after the next election. It’s hard to make a moral case for cutting social programs and science research (like climatology or unmanned space probes) to spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to put a human on Mars.
Robert Zubrin, the head of the Mars Society, figures a private explorer could get there within a decade for $8 billion to $10 billion, and a good chunk of that cost — maybe all of it — could be offset with revenues from media rights and marketing tie-ins. Elon Musk, the Paypal founder who’s now building rockets in his new company, SpaceX, guesses it could be done for just $5 billion.
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