From NASAWatch: According to articles from SpaceRef and MSNBC, Millionaire Elon Musk has expressed interest in Mars projects.

Obviously, Zubrin would love to have him on board as a Mars Society "angel," but it looks to me like Musk intends to fly off on his own. Musk and his partners have their own preliminary web site.

The first article does say something true:

Forbes magazine recently identified 538 billionaires in 46 countries with an average net worth of $3.2 billion. The richest, Bill Gates is worth more than $50 billion. If you believe Robert Zubrin's numbers (or even if you don't but feel that there are cheaper ways than the NASA way to get there), then there may be a way to send a human mission to Mars for a fraction of the net worth of one of these people.



It only takes one of them to show up at one of these meetings.



I've worked with Gary Hudson on a number of projects, and most of them got financed when someone with money and Gary happened to be in the same place at the same time, usually at some conference. It can work.

Of course, now we've gotten somewhat tired of the investor bit (it can be a major hassle), so we're just working straight customer contracts, but it did work once.

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By the way, I'm not sure about the "rat hotel" idea. I know what it takes to keep a bunch of rats healthy--a lot of stinky, hard work. I'd like to see an automated system that can handle all the things that can go wrong in a rat colony for two months. Believe me, if there was some way to automatically care for rats without human assistance, every lab on Earth would have it.

Besides, the wheel radius is too small.

I think this experiment is going to have to wait for a manned space station to take it on--a station with a separate rat module and an air lock (rats can REALLY stink!)