With a track record of discovering the Americas, building the transcontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, space travel, and the internet, how could private enterprise miss?

Is there anything the free Libertarian cannot do? Other than get the cheeto stains out of his mom's sofa in his basement room? "Mom! I'm busy planning the mars expedition! Go back upstairs!"

Private enterprise is big enough to do these things because of government... IBM exists because we needed them in WWII and the fight against communism... There's handful of multi-billion dollar "private" enterprises that built our military and got us to the moon, but they wouldn't have existed without tax dollars.

Maybe Google and Microsoft will toss a few billion at these guys but it's not going to be enough. As far as discovering America, these were chartered explorers as well, so, like the big corporations of our day, their success was directly tied to the taxes reaped from the common people.

Unless they've figured out a way to send Lindsay Lohan and Justin Bieber on that one-way trip, their funding mechanism is destined for failure. Maybe they can team with the Bachelorette show, that might work.

BTW, who exactly _is_ gonna take a one way trip to a totally inhospitable planet to die there? While I agree the resulting media product would be of interest, it's likely it will only be to us here, if you know what I mean.

You'd need someone who had enough basic skills to be worth their oxygen supply yet idealistic enough or desperate enough to leave Earth forever. Incentives might include being able to claim X number of square kilometers of Mars as your own property, like a homestead, that you could sell or will to your heirs.

I think you'd have no problem finding people to colonize another planet! They'd have to be taken from the toughest folk in the world though. They'd need years of training and would have to have experience in these kinds of living environments... Maybe Antarctic researchers and Navy guys who have spent years on submarines in close quarters with people they might not really like.

Hegemony Cricket, I don't mean you any ill will whatsoever.

But imagining a terminally ill, or terminally old, poetv-er desperately spending the last minutes of life making sure we can all appreciate this farce, well it's just grand is all.