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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

This makes me wonder if we could crowdsource the Titan Mare mission which got passed over for another bot to Mars.

It "only" costs $425 million ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Mare_Explorer )

It could definitely hit a huge sum of money, if people who weren't just Indigogo and Kickstarter lurkers got into a campaign for funding it. Celebrities, big names in all kinds of industries could come together for something that's so obviously compelling.

I mean, look at what Kony managed to get people to do, and that wasn't even a proper cause.

I honestly think the guy from Oatmeal carries so much weigh he could generate maybe several million dollars for a cause. If he did a couple of comics about the Mars bot who knows

Maybe there's a cheaper Mars project :)

Not Mars - Titan, moon of two planets out, Saturn.

The one with nitrogen atmosphere, methane lakes, rain and hurricanes.

Way, way more interesting than Mars in some ways.

And speaking of those methane lakes, the lander was designed as a boat that would float around in one of them. To me that seems pretty interesting from an engineering point of view, not to mention Titan being a pretty cool place from a scientific perspective.

Maybe I'm a skeptic, but I don't think people are going to keep funneling money because of who he is. His fanbase can only allocate so much or deal with so many outreaches and I would wager they only did this one because it was hot off the heels of a very successful campaign. When you know the project is going to succeed because of auto-generated hype and press, it's a lot easier to press submit.

Something space-related, while Curiosity is still fresh in people's minds, might work, but I don't think he can keep getting these numbers regularly. I'd like to be wrong, though.

Not to be a spoil sport, but it's rather easy to raise money and buy land; it's much more difficult to get a probe built and onto the surface of another world.

Plus, does that estimate include support satellites (it apparently doesn't include the costs of getting the probe there)?

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