The Case for Mars (40 page)

TABLE 8.3
Possible Cost Reductions of Earth-to-Mars Transportation System

Nevertheless, the $320,000 fare cited for early immigrants is interesting. It’s not a sum of money that anyone would spend lightly, but it is a sum of money—roughly the cost of an affluent upper-middle-class house in many parts of suburban America, or put another way, roughly the life’s savings of a successful middle-class family—that a large number of people could finance if they really wanted to do so. Why would they want to do so? Simply this: because of the small size of the Martian population and the large transport cost itself, it is certain that the cost of labor on Mars will be much greater than on Earth. Therefore, wages may be much higher on Mars than on Earth. While $320,000 might be six years’ salary to an engineer on Earth, it would likely represent only one or two years’ salary on Mars. This wage differential, precisely analogous to the wage differential between Europe and America during most of the past four centuries, can make emigration to Mars both desirable and possible for the individual. From the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, many European families followed a classic pattern of pooling their resources to enable one family member to emigrate to America. That emigrant, in turn, would proceed to earn enough money to bring the r
est of the family over. Today, the same method of obtaining passage is used by Third World immigrants whose salaries in their native lands are dwarfed by current airfares. Because the necessary income will be there to pay for the trip after it has been made, loans can even be taken out to finance the journey. It’s been done in the past, and can be done in the future.

As mentioned before, the labor shortage that will prevail on Mars will drive Martian civilization toward both technological and social advances. If you’re paying five times the terrestrial wage rate, you’re not going to want to waste any of your worker’s time with stoop labor or filling out forms, and you will not seek to exclude someone who can perform some desperately needed profession from doing so just because he or she has not taken the trouble to run some institutional obstacle course. In short, Martian civilization will be practical because it will have to be, just as nineteenth-century American civilization was. This forced pragmatism will give Mars an enormous advantage in competing with the less-stressed and therefore more tradition-bound society remaining behind on Earth. If necessity is the mother of invention, Mars will provide the cradle. A frontier society based on technological excellence and pragmatism, and populated by people self-selected for personal drive, will perforce be a hotbed of invention, and these inventions will not only serve the needs of Mars but of the terrestrial population as well. Therefore, they will bring income to Mars (via terrestrial licensing) while at the same time they disrupt the labor-rich terrestrial society’s inherent tendency towards stagnation. This process of rejuvenation, as we’ll discuss in later chapters, will ultimately be the greatest benefit that the colonization of Mars will offer Earth. And it will be those terrestrial societies who have the closest social, cultural, linguistic, and economic links with the Martians who will benefit the most.

SELLING MARTIAN REAL ESTATE

Martian real estate can be broken down into two categories: habitable and open. By habitable real estate I mean that which is under a dome, allowing human settlers to live there in a relatively conventional shirtsleeve environment. Open real estate, on the other hand, is that which lies outside the domes. It is obvious that habitable real estate is far more valuable than open. Nevertheless, both of these can be bought and sold, and as transportation costs drop, both forms of Martian real estate will rise in value.

The only kind of land that exists on Mars right now is open. There is an immense amount of it—144 million square kilometers—but it might seem that it is all completely worthless because it cannot currently be exploited. Not so. Enormous tracts of land were bought and sold in Kentucky for large sums of money a hundred years before settlers arrived. For purposes of development, trans-Appalachian America in the 1600s might as well have been Mars. Two things, though, made these distant lands valuable and salable. For one, at least a few people believed that the land would be exploitable someday, and a juridical arrangement existed in the form of British Crown land patents that allowed trans-Appalachian land to be privately owned. In fact, if a mechanism were put in place that could enforce private property rights on Mars, land there could probably be bought and sold now. Such a mechanism would not need to employ enforcers on the surface of Mars (no space patrol required). Instead, the patent or property registry of a sufficiently powerful nation, such as the United States, would be entirely adequate. For example, if the United States co grant a mining patent to any private group that surveyed a piece of Martian real estate to some specified degree of fidelity, such claims would be tradable today on the basis of their future speculative worth (and could probably be used to privately finance robotic mining survey probes in the near future). Furthermore, such claims would be enforceable internationally and throughout the solar system simply by having the U.S. Customs Office penalize with a punitive tariff any U.S. import made anywhere, directly or indirectly, with material that was extracted in defiance of the claim. This sort of mechanism would not necessarily imply U.S. sovereignty over Mars, any more then the current U.S. Patent and Copyright Office’s coining of ideas into intellectual property implies U.S government sovereignty over the universe of ideas. But, whether it’s the United States, NATO, the United Nations, or the Martian Republic, some government’s agreement is needed to give worthless terrain real estate property value.

Once t
hat is in place, however, even the undeveloped open real estate on Mars represents a tremendous source of capital to finance the initial development of Martian settlements. Sold at an average value of $10 per acre, Mars could be worth $358 billion. Should Mars be terraformed, these open land prices could be expected to grow a hundredfold, with a rough planetary land value of $36 trillion implied. Assuming, as appears to be the case, that a method of terraforming Mars could be found with a total cost much less than this, those who own Mars would have every reason to seek to develop their property via planetary engineering.

Of course, all open real estate on Mars will not be of equal value. Those sections known to contain valuable minerals, water, geothermal power potential, or other resources, or which are located closer to the habitable areas, will be worth much more. For these reasons, as with land speculators on Earth in the past, the owners of open unexplored real estate on Mars will exercise all their influence to further the exploration of, and encourage the settlement of, land under their control.

Far more valuable than the open real estate will be habitable real estate beneath the domes. Each 100-meter diameter dome, massing about 80 tonnes, would enclose an area of about two acres. Assuming that dwelling units for 20 families are erected within, and each family is willing to pay $50,000 for their habitation land (a plot 20 meters on a side), then the total real estate value enclosed by a single dome would be $1 million. At this rate, the creation of habitable land by the mass production and erection of large numbers of domes to house the waves of immigrants should prove to be one of the biggest businesses on Mars and a major source of income for the colony.

In the twenty-first century, Earth’s population growth will make real estate here ever more expensive, making it harder for people to own their own homes. At the same time, the ongoing bureaucratization of daily life will make it ever harder for strong spirits to find adequate means for expressing their creative drive and initiative on Earth. Regulation to “protect” what is will become ever more burdensome to those who would create what is not. A confined world will limit opportunity for all and seek to enforce behavioral and cultural norms that will be unacceptable to many. When the frictions turn into inevitable revolts and wars, there will
be losers. Looking around the world today, it is not difficult to pick out dozens of small nations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and Europe that adjoin larger nations that now or in the past have demonstrated the desire to conquer their neighbors. Again, there will be wars, and losers, and millions of emigrants willing to take on the hard challenges of making a new life on the frontier rather than accept subjugation. A planet of refuge will be needed, and Mars will be there.

HISTORICAL ANALOGIES

The primary analogy I wish to draw is that Mars is to the new age of exploration what North America was to the last. The Earth’s Moon, close to the metropolitan planet but impoverished in resources, compares to Greenland. Other destinations, such as the Main Belt asteroids, may be rich in potential future exports to Earth, but lack the preconditions for the creation of a fully developed indigenous society—these compare to the West Indies. Only Mars has the full set of resources required to develop a native civilization, and only Mars is a viable target for true colonization. Like America in its relationship to Britain and the West Indies, Mars has a positional advantage with respect to the asteroids that will allow it to participate in a useful way to support extractive activities on behalf of Earth. But despite the shortsighted calculations of eighteenth-century European statesmen and financiers, the true value of America never was as a logistical support base for the West Indies’ sugar and spice trade, or inland fur trade, or as a potential market for manufactured goods. The true value of America was as the future home for a new branch of human civilization, one that combined its humanistic antecedents and its frontier conditions to develop into the most powerful engine for human progress and economic growth the world had ever seen. The wealth of America was in the fact that she could support people, and that the right kind of people chose to go to her. Every feature of frontier American life that acted to create a practical can-do culture of innovative people will apply to Mars one hundredfold.

Mars is a harsher place than any on Earth. But provided o
ne can survive the regimen, it is the toughest schools that are the best. The Martians shall do well.

FOCUS SECTION—ADVANCED INTERPLANETARY TRANSPORTATION

Destination drives transportation. Just as the opening of the New World drove a revolution in European naval architecture, so will the establishment of a Mars base summon new types of space propulsion systems that will make the colonization of Mars commercially feasible. These new systems, vastly more capable than anything we have today, have been on the drawing boards for some time, waiting for the spur of necessity to call them into being. Let’s look and see what the future might hold.

AIR-BREATHING LAUNCH SYSTEMS

Current rocket-based launch systems are only about 2 percent as efficient in hauling cargo as jet aircraft. The reason for this difference is simple—rockets haul their own oxidizer while jets get theirs from the air. Since the oxidizer makes up about 75 percent of the total propellant weight, this enormously compromises a rocket vehicle’s performance. Launch vehicles attempting to reach orbit are flying through an ocean of oxidizer. Why don’t they try to use any of it?

Unfortunately, technical difficulties and lack of will have intersected to stall the development of hypersonic air-breathing propulsion. Current ramjet engines used on some missiles can make it to Mach 5.5, but beyond this speed it becomes impossible to slow the air that enters the jet engine to subsonic speeds without heating the air too much in the process. Thus, the combustion inside the engine must take place in a supersonic flow. An engine that can do this is a new type of animal, a “scramjet,” and is in a sense as much of an advance over existing jet engines as jet waie over propellers. The National Aerospace Plane (NASP) program—canceled in 1993 due to lack of perceived necessity—conducted extensive computer calcula
tions showing that scramjets will work. A somewhat less technologically challenging approach that can obtain much of the scramjet’s benefits is the air-augmented rocket: a rocket that obtains part of its needed oxidizer from the atmosphere during its upward flight. Air-augmented rockets that could get a specific impulse over 1,000 seconds were demonstrated on the test stand at The Marquardt Company in 1966. Unfortunately, a change in governmental bureaucratic whims canceled the program before the engines could be flight tested.

The use of scramjets or air-augmented rockets on even part of the launch trajectory of a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicle would greatly increase its payload. This is exactly what is needed to meet the logistics demands of a developing Mars settlement, which will call for the cheap delivery of large amounts of cargo to orbit, and beyond. The colonization of Mars is thus central to the development of the technologies that will give us cheap access to space.