Nonprofit prize may boost aid, interest in Mars trip
Mina Mukhar would sit on his rooftop as a child and look at the stars, picturing the vast distance their light traveled before twinkling over his home in Richmond.
“I just always wondered what it was like thousands of light-years out there,” Mukhar said. “I always thought that we’d be able to travel in a spaceship when I was older, just like we could travel in airplanes.”
But that future didn’t feel closer as he got older. There never seemed to be enough money.
So Mukhar, now 38, founded Pearland-based Mars Initiative in 2011. The nonprofit collects donations for a prize fund that will be given to the first entity (private company, government, etc.) to put humans on Mars.
It has raised more than $20,000, and it has volunteers or donors across 41 countries.
As the fund grows (and if humanity continues to dillydally), the prize money will ideally become large enough to encourage innovation. It could entice companies to invest their own money in reaching Mars knowing that some costs would be recouped if they win.
The money could also help sustain the burgeoning entity moving forward.
“The cost doesn’t stop as soon as a person sets foot on the surface,” said Chris Bellant, executive director of Mars Initiative. “If it’s a one-way mission, you’re going to have to send resupply missions. If it’s a round-trip mission, you still have to pay for your flight control team the entire way back.”
Prize funds have previously been used to spur innovation in space. The $10 million Ansari XPRIZE was created to incentivize a reusable and privately financed crewed spaceship that could help make private space travel commercially viable. It encouraged 26 teams to invest a combined $100 million.
This prize was awarded to Mojave Aerospace Ventures in 2004 after its Space Ship One crossed the 62-mile threshold into space twice within two weeks. Led by aerospace designer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites, with financial backing from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, the team’s technology was licensed by billionaire Richard Branson for space tourism company Virgin Galactic.
Meagan Crawford, a boardmember for Mars Initiative and managing partner of Houston-based venture capital firm SpaceFund, said these types of prizes help emerging companies attract investors. It’s essentially a pool of money to pay them back.
“In a nascent sector of the economy, where there is not much investor funding available, it provides an additional source of motivation,” Crawford said. “A way to offset development costs.”
Mars Initiative is a long way from having a $10 million carrot to dangle. Bellant said one of the biggest challenges is getting the word out. Mars Initiative is bringing on interns — college students or recent graduates — early next year to help with messaging. The nonprofit’s personnel are all unpaid volunteers.
“Once we talk to somebody that has any interest in outer space about what we’re doing, we almost always get positive feedback,” Bellant said.
And while it’d be nice to get celebrity endorsers and big-dollar sponsors, Mars Initiative wants to continue providing an opportunity for individual space enthusiasts, like Mukhar, to be part of the mission. Mukhar started Mars Initiative while he was a financial management consultant at KPMG accounting firm. He now owns an auto repair facility. Bellant works at NASA’s Johnson Space Center That’s really one of the things I like most about the organization,” Bellant said. “It gives anybody on the planet a way to participate in what will be, really, one of the biggest missions of our generation. Probably the biggest thing that will happen in our lives.”
Bellant, 37, joined Mars Initiative in 2015. Like Mukhar, he was frustrated by grand space ambitions met with lackluster funding. As a student at the University of Michigan, Bellant went door-to-door collecting soda cans to raise money for a grant program that would fund space ambitions. Each can was worth a dime.
He folded this grant program into Mars Initiative, and he gave it an education-specific focus. The Mars Initiative grant program has awarded roughly $1,100 to teachers with space-related lesson plans. These have included sun-spotters to watch the solar eclipse in 2017 and electronics kits to create experiments that were put in high-altitude balloons or aircraft to study the atmosphere.
The grant program has another $3,200 to award. This is separate from the Mars Prize Fund. Every dol-lar that goes into the Mars Prize Fund stays there until humans reach Mars. Donors can choose to support the grant program, Mars Prize Fund, operations fund (this helps cover some of Mars Initiative’s expenses) or to split their donation across all three.
And based on estimates that it would take $30 billion to travel 300 million miles to Mars, the nonprofit considers a $100 donation as the equivalent of funding one mile to Mars. Mars Initiative is designing certificates to give donors when they fund a mile to the Red Planet.
“I got my first Mars mile, and I’m working onmy second,” said Mike Zentz, a donor from Thompson Falls, Mont.
Zentz is a software designer who, in his spare time, writes software that could help sift through telescope data to find planets outside of our solar system.
He said having a new frontier to explore would fuel innovation and give people new opportunities. He likes backing the Mars Initiative rather than a single company or program that may or may not reach Mars.
“I liked the Mars Initiative because they are trying to find ways to help get humans to Mars in our lifetime,” he said.
Mars Initiative has rules detailing what entities are eligible to win the prize fund and what they must do to qualify for the money (for instance, at least one person must be in the vehicle and alive upon landing, and the entity must provide video, photo and navigational data). But Mukhar and Bellant are still working out specifics on how they’d transfer money to the winner. They plan to finalize those details with specific entities as they get close to launching people to Mars.
If there is an issue getting money to the winning entity (perhaps China reaches Mars first), then they will work with donors and the Mars Initiative board to redirect the money to another Mars-related goal.
In the meantime, funding continues to limit missions to Mars. And with each year that passes, the Mars Prize Fund grows larger.
“Part of me hopes that our prize fund doesn’t ever become that large because that means it will take a long time to get to Mars,” Bellant said. “It would be great to see us get there so fast that this prize fund wasn’t necessary. Because that’s really what we’re here for. To ensure that even if other people aren’t working on it, we’re still working on it. And all of our donors are still working on it.”