In a way MarsDrive goes against traditional thinking when it comes to planning and costing missions.
I was talking to someone who’s job it is to put together costing and bids for a major space tech company to get a rough idea for the estimated cost of two hypothetical projects. In both cases the response was along the lines "Oh I can't see that coming in below 100 million pounds."

Why? Is it the launch cost? The difference between a soft or hard landing on one of the hypothetical projects? The destination?
No, it's really the cost of the expertise.

I guess it's the fact that it's still such a niche market with so few major companies operating in the club so you have to pay what the market demands.
It isn't that dissimilar to the computer industry in its early days when people scoffed at the idea of putting computers into homes. The established players couldn't see beyond giant and very expensive machines for government and big business.
Fit a computer into a home? Why? How? Computers are huge, the technology vast and expensive, it'll never happen.
Then hobbyist and small companies who could think originally started to create smaller, simpler machines and created new markets and demonstrated commercial interest.
Clive Sinclair with the ZX80 and the following machines and other manufacturers of DIY kit and home computers and software companies which appeared from no where to show how software could be as important as hardware.
Now look at where the industry is.
Stop to think about the technology on your desk and how impossible it seemed as little as 20 or 30 years ago.

I see MarsDrive as giving the hobbyists and start up companies a forum to think beyond 100 million pound corporate or government missions.
A place for people to think, discuss and innovate freely while moving towards a shared goal and vision.

Is space tech set to become the new computer tech industry?

Who knows but while corporates currently focus on big profit ventures and tech around earth science and governments focus on pushing forward the science and tech to allow corporates to drive industry forward, groups such as MarsDrive offer a very important view into space science away from just big business and earth science.
I don't think theres as much focus on Mars at the moment as there could be because it isn't as profitable as closer earth science based project. Guidance sats, GPS, monitoring technology etc is commercial and profitable, going to Mars yields a smaller up front return. Currently I think Mars is only on the table for political reasons which I'm not complaining about because anything that makes government stump up the money is good in my eyes.
How make it profitable or develop affordable and related technology and it becomes much much more and far more sustainable.

That's just my view anyway.
I want to see MarsDrive make the difference that's needed and show the leadership the larger industry needs while really getting people interested and active. If the expense is down to expertise being too closed we need to make that expertise more accessible and available.

Some ideas I'm going to follow up on next.

1. Look for new sponsors for the website and forum. I'm not planning to just bombard everyone with invites so ff anyone has suggestions for companies that may want to advertise through MarsDrive or take part in a link exchange to help draw attention to the MarsDrive initiative then let me know.
We could also include Google AdWords although I think it would be better to have fewer but better advertisers.

2. If we could get members interested then we could run a ‘raise awareness week’.
Pick a week and invite people to do activities to raise awareness and sponsorship money. This could be from doing sponsored activities to downloading, printing and distributing flyers.
I can add pages to the site for downloading promotional material and for showing what people are doing.

3. Run a competition. Now it doesn’t need to be cash based but with planning a competition can be a great way to draw attention, especially if it’s very unusual.
We don’t want to do dull writing or drawing competitions, we want to do something as strange as possible so the blogs and forums pick up on it.
For instance, http://news.cnet.com/830...7852_3-10376679-71.html is doing the rounds and getting a lot of mentions.
These guys run a lot of local competitions and can be quite good to get ideas from http://space4schools.com...hip&mgroup=overview
Now I could do something like donate 30 computer game posters and some other promotional gaming material which I get sent a lot of various gaming companies. Ideally though we could get a space related company to donate something more unusual and in return they’ll get promotion through the MarsDrive website...all good press and many companies who won’t give away money will be happy to donate something taking up room in an office or warehouse.

4. Another way of raising money is to approach companies and ask for donations. Not money but things we can auction off with proceeds going to the MarsDrive program. They get free promotion since all donators are covered in articles and are mentioned in any press releases etc. Again it doesn’t cost them anything since they usually give away what they don’t need but others find collectable.
I’ve seen this done to good effect by other charities.



Anyway, just playing with ideas to try and shake things up a bit for members and reignite interest in the Mars program, especially while the Obama administration works through the details for NASA's future roadmap.