"Larry [Page] asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, ‘Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?’ So now we’re starting to get a little argument over the price.”
Larry is currently listed on Forbes as being worth $14b, so $1b really isn’t a huge amount of his total cashpile.
IMHO designing a system that would enable a pretty good odds of coming back would be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than a similarly reliable one way system.
Think of all the additional R&D and engineering difficulties involved in keeping a human alive long enough to get there, do something there come back and survive.
More to the point, what's the cost of a Moon base - where a return and even a rescue is feasible - AND a one-way extensive robotic exploration of Mars. It just seems an overly dramatic waste (there will be no shortage of people willing to go) to send people to die on Mars when we can get the same off-Earth habitation expertise and Mars scientific data for the same price or cheaper.
The thing with Mars is, once you're on the surface, you can manufacture fuel for the return trip in-situ. Dr Robert Zubrin covers this in his Mars Direct mission blueprint.
And you get oxygen to breathe for free! The Mars Direct plan calls for the initial deployment of an unmanned mission to set up a fuel station on the surface - then unmanned missions to cache supplies there - and only when you have enough stuff pre-deployed for the return trip and/or a permanent presence, send humans.
The moon may be closer, but until you have a working fusion reactor, there's not much you can usefully do there in terms of resource extraction.
A bajillionaire whose name is hardly household might be able to buy eternal, historical name recognition by taking such a one-way trip as a way of "going out in style".
Robert Zubrin estimated that his Mars Direct plan would cost about $20B to develop the vehicles and other equipment, then $1B per launch with two launches per year.
Each launch enables a one-way trip to or from Mars.
In the past when someone had a challenge, they would pull out their sliderule. Now when someone claims something is impossible they pull out their wallet.
"Larry [Page] asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, ‘Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?’ So now we’re starting to get a little argument over the price.”
Larry is currently listed on Forbes as being worth $14b, so $1b really isn’t a huge amount of his total cashpile.