Hi Nick -

My guess is that the prospects for a private sector manned Mars flight any time soon ended when the roof on the shed of the Eneriga storage facility collapsed. I my view, that's when it moved out of private reach and back to the government funding level.

In any case, it's going to take years to clear the back-contamination problem. The usual monomaniacs will throw their tantrums now, but for me, the goal is to face this problem square on and get through it. Given public sentiment about manned Mars flights, private sector Mars rovers strike me as the way to do this.

I think that private sector manned Mars flights will have to wait until a new type of reaction engine is invented. It may be somehting like Chang-Diaz proposed, but my guess is that lost heat energy will be captured and used - but then my magneto-hydrodynamics are not that good, or I'd have invented the damned thing by now. It my be some technology sompletely unforeseen - my crystal balls gets pretty hazy at this point...

I think that perhaps a small international research station on Mars around 2040-2050 may be possible if CAPS gets through - but only if CAPS gets through. When I think about these dates I recall Willy Ley, who supported manned space flight throughout his life, and then died about a week before Apollo 11 was launched.