Making a profit on Mars
Can people make a profit colonizing Mars. Maybe, some, if things go right.
Over and over, all across social media, people say you cannot make a profit colonizing Mars. This idea largely comes from having a bad, or no, economic model to work from, or worse, working from the wrong model. Let’s start with how some companies will make a profit.
If you have construction crews on Mars, a company like Caterpillar can ship huge, remote-operated land movers and their operation booth there. They can then lease them to those construction companies for more than twice the total those machines cost them to build and ship to Mars over that piece of equipment’s lifetime. They will continue to make a profit doing that until there are too many land movers there to lease them all for more than it cost to build and send. That number is largely dependent on how many construction companies are working there.
Lots of other companies can send equipment to lease on Mars, too. Some will lose money doing that, never recouping the cost of getting it there. Others will earn several times what it cost them to get that equipment there. It is highly unlikely that enough equipment will be sent so that the average company paying to get it there is doing so at a loss, not a profit, but that average profit will be low for most.
Then there is the buildings. The demand for habitable buildings is likely to be massive, making building them the single most profitable enterprise on Mars. The number of sealed buildings and their bio systems on Mars will be the main limiting factor for that colony. Supply won’t keep up with demand for decades at the soonest, if then, making constructing habitable buildings on Mars highly profitable, with the companies that turn out the largest number of sound buildings the cheapest, making the most money. Domes and tunnels buried under the sand look to be the cheapest and fastest to build, as well as easiest to maintain by far. Companies will be hard pressed to turn them out faster than people and companies will buy them up.
That demand has the potential to make the real estate market on a Mars colony a trillion-dollar market within a decade or two of getting started. Water harvesting and energy production are the next two large profit businesses. How much profit, however, is dependent on things too complicated to cover here. Some other things will bring in minor profit, entertainment, research, and a very small amount of exports, but those will be small compared to building and selling buildings.
Then there is local profit in the local economy. Providing food will be a high dollar and profitable thing and get a lot of investment. People and companies will be buying locally grown food with their money on earth and what they earn there. With few exceptions, they will be paying nearly the same price as it would cost them to ship that food from earth. If they are not paying that much, there are better things people can grow to sell that will bring in that much since it will not be possible for Mars to supply its demand for fibers, oils, and other organic chemicals for many decades. The demand for many of those will even put that price higher than what importing it cost. Shortages will be so severe that every possible place you can grow something, you will, and people’s apartments will more resemble greenhouses than what people visualize. But that also means that there are profits to be had growing, lots of it.
Then there is making goods and providing services. Turning bamboo and hemp and other things into chairs, bed, desk, blankets, mattresses, and on and on, for example, are things people living there will need done. For a time, there will be fewer people there to do it than the demand calls for. That means profits are there to be had for those with those skills. Same for soap makers, cloth makers, clothiers, cobblers, etc. But this is a separate economy only loosely tied into Earth’s, so you will not have many Earth base companies investing heavily in them and they will be dominated by those who are trying to live there.
But all of these potentially profitable enterprises are very high risk. That building market utterly depends on there being enough transportation, and it being cheap enough. One small Starbase won’t cut it, for example. It also depends on how international the effort is. There are powerful factions that are fighting to limit how many ships may be sent, who can launch them, and who can invest there, confining all launches to the few launchers at Starbase. In their vision, the US has one Mars base, China another established later, and maybe Russia yet a third even later than that, all unable to catch up to the US mission there. That eliminates nearly 60 percent of all likely investors can close to 80 percent of the manpower pool in my guestimation, and that massively limits profits.
What kind of political system, and what kind of monopolies are granted, also affects how profitable different things are and how much they make? But that is another post.
So, end the end, how profitable colonizing Mars for each company or individual is, comes down to decisions that will be outside their control. The potential for profit is there, but so is losing every dime you might invest in it.
