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> I firmly believe Musk is totally willing to bankrupt his company (and himself) to achieve his goal of landing on Mars, but are his investors?

It would seem so, yes.

> What about Boeing and Lockheed Martin (ULA)?

Doubtful. Their motivation is to earn profit. Elon's motivation is his "pioneerism" (the doctrine behind the act of pioneering).

> At least with a government landing on Mars, you can expect science to be conducted.

It's been 44 years since humans physically conducted science on another body. Robots are great for "doing science" that's planned out in advance, humans are great for "doing science" ad-hoc.

> What does a for-profit company do there, when there's not much to make a profit from?

I just don't see SpaceX as a for-profit company when its leader unabashedly says that profiteering would ruin his vision for SpaceX. The fact that people keep throwing money at them just underscores the human (and, yes, corporate) drive to stand behind him.

> What's the end-game here? We land and say "we did it!"... then what?

That's the most wonderful thing of all. We don't know what would happen next. To quote Richard Feynman (emphasis added): "Some people say, 'How can you live without knowing?' I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know."

His plan isn't to land on Mars. His plan is to settle Mars. At the end of the day, it means that humanity will have a second planet to call home. If you have difficulty calculating the value of that, it's because it's incalculable.

(Of course in the process of landing a million people on Mars, he'll need to balance the books to make it financially sustainable. I do have some questions about how he'll do that, but can envision a handful of ways to make it work. The actual value, however, is almost entirely off-book.)

> what's in it for both companies - besides notoriety?

Financially:

(1) It's a wonderful tech demo and brand builder to attract customers who want to buy a ride to LEO on a very reliable rocket.

(2) To get to mars without a national-sized budget, they need to make the entire project stack cheaper and more reliable than ever before, which helps them sell rides to LEO cheaper than the competition.

(3) What's the end-game here? We land and say "we did it!"... then what?

Musk says he is dead serious about a permanent colony on Mars as insurance against human extinction on Earth. There's no end game - it's the beginning of life spreading from the Earth.

After they have conclusively proven the success of their large launcher with countless launches to get all the equipment and supplies in orbit and the SpaceX mission leaves for Mars what is SpaceX going to do? Sit on it's laurels and wait for the mission to reach Mars? Or maybe allow anyone to launch massive payloads into space on a very well proven platform.

If SpaceX can show they are have a very capable platform for heavy lifting before anyone else they can retain that position for a long time. Moon bases, Hubble replacements, long term space stations all need heavy launch capabilities. SpaceX wants to sell them their premier service.

That's an interesting angle I hadn't considered.

Although, wouldn't building a moon base first make more sense? Walk before you can run, sort of thing? Or even Venus, since it's closer.

You'd have to convince Elon Musk. Me, I'd go large geosynchronous space station first.

Go get a massive asteroid and build a facility out at L1 Lagrange point.

L1,L2,L3 are unstable. Better build it at L4 or L5, which are stable.

I imagine this is to compete in the talent war heating up for Aero/Astro engineers, with sexy companies like Space X and Blue Origin siphoning the best talent from places like Boeing.

I think this is as good an explanation today as it was in 1970. You are the nun in this story.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

Not exactly. This question was posed to NASA, not a private, investor-funded for-profit corporation.

NASA is a government scientific research entity, and has no obligation to turn a profit. SpaceX and ULA do.

First, as others have pointed out, there's a promise of profits that SpaceX can sell. Similar to Amazon, who were and are selling investors on the promise of growing and owning online retail, SpaceX can sell investors on the promise of growing and owning the space industry--travel, mining, government contracts, and more.

Secondly, it's worth noting that "billions" isn't as big of a number as you'd think in the context of modern capital markets. PwC published a paper recently that estimated there'd be $100 trillion in so-called assets under management (AuM) by 2020. (http://www.pwc.com/us/en/press-releases/2014/pwc-global-asse...) The market capitalization of Amazon _today_ is $400 billion.

Theoretically, SpaceX could easily raise all the money it needs and more. I don't know how practical that would be, or even if that's their plan at all. But the salient point here is that there's a _ridiculous_ amount of global capital up for grabs. This ain't the 1950s or 1980s. The rise of the third-world and the pace of global trade has created an almost unfathomable amount of wealth. Even if the markets crash tomorrow and it's cut in half, it's still unfathomable from the perspective of 20 or 30 years ago.

I remember reading an Economist article in the late 1990s (maybe early oughts) that showed using historical data that wealth tended to grow exponentially. (I haven't been able to track it down.) The point of the article was that wealth inequality will naturally increase dramatically because for any time span those with more wealth will accumulate even more wealth, proportionally, then someone poorer. The gap will naturally widen without forced redistribution.

Ignore issues about wealth inequality for a moment and think about what that phenomenon means for the amount of global capital available for investment. All that capital needs to be _invested_ somewhere. Even if appetite for risk never changes, it means the amount of capital available for the most risky ventures will grow dramatically. But perhaps as capital growth outpaces investment opportunities, appetite for risk will increase.

My point being, the practicality of a privately-funded Mars venture is likely to become more practical by the year. So even if it's starry-eyed today, it might not be in 5 or 10 years.

I think that the big play with SpaceX is that it will open up tons of avenues of that we haven't even thought about. Going back to his keynote a few days ago he is assessing multiple parts of space travel and trying to bring costs down orders of magnitude - and if they are the only group that can do it at those costs, then it seems like it will completely change what is possible to do in space.