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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

The story so far has been that SpaceX will go public to raise the money to get to Mars. Theoretically it jibes well because there'll have to be a ton of launches to get there and establish a self-sustaining colony.

What hasn't been talked about much (probably because it's a decade or two away and thus quite speculative) has been the economics of colonization. Yes, money can be raised for an expedition perhaps with public/international/crowdfunding assistance, but then what? What profit or economics will drive colonization? Would the chance of establishing their own new country be enough? How do you convince ~100k people to pay 500k each to go there?

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> The story so far has been that SpaceX will go public to raise the money to get to Mars

The idea of SpaceX being public makes me very nervous about the future of commercial space (though I really, really want them to succeed). Think back to when NASA lost people (Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia) - these were seen as huge national tragedies followed by years of public scrutiny and gov't inquiry. But work pushed on, because their funding and momentum to continue with operations was decoupled from these reactions.

Now, imagine the first time SpaceX loses a human. If they are public, that could kill the entire company right there. Stock traders are not rational actors.

There will be significant launch insurance contracts written to protect the company against such a scenario.

Drawing up those insurance contracts is a non-trivial endeavour too. There are specialist space divisions of major insurers who can package up space reinsurance as a nice investment whose returns are uncorrelated with market returns, but they're already in a situation where in years where one launch incident involving a sufficiently expensive satellite payload can wipe out the profits for the whole space insurance industry in a year. They make it back in future years because of the continuing demand for satellite launches. Now imagine there are people on board, the rocket is headed to colonise Mars and the CEO is on board. Not all of that risk to the future of private sector space industry as a whole is insurable.

What profit or economics will drive colonization?

Consumption goods, not investment goods.

How do you convince ~100k people to pay 500k each to go there?

Back of the envelope Drake-like equation:

• Minimum wealth of richest 1% of Americans: $8.4 million

• Of those, 1% are in good enough mental and physical health to go

• Of those, 1% actually want to go.

That's 30,000 people. Obviously those numbers are seat-of-my-pants. Maybe only 1-in-a-thousand of people capable of making the trip want to go.

EDIT Tomp is right, my math was wrong.

Or 1 in a million. Or 1. Its a chancy proposition. Wealthy Americans are a very narrow demographic. Their risk-taking gene may be very correlated. I think you'd get either a lot of them, or almost none.

That's more like 300 people.

If the ticket is only $500k, I don't see it being limited to the top 1% richest. Given that you're making a one way trip to another planet, you no longer have need for any of your property including your car and home. If a middle class person making $80k - $150k were to save for 10 - 15 years then sell all their property then they certainly would be able to put together $500k. I know I'd be willing to go if Musk is able to pull this off.

In terms of compensation for the colonists, what are you going to do with money when you're on a dead rock 225 million kilometres from Earth?

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