Yep, I'm sure there are at least 50 teams that would have the tens of billions of dollars in up-front capital needed to try for Mars themselves -- getting zero payback if anything goes wrong or if any of the other 49 teams beat them. I'm sure investors would be lining up for those odds. UNless of course, we offer a prize of $500 billion for what could probably be done for $50 billion -- gotta have huge returns for such high, all-or-nothing risks -- but for $500 billion, we could have just had NASA do it too.

OK, I had sworn I wouldn't get dragged into this whole "prize" debate. I'm out.