The Mars Society has launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund the Mars Technology Institute (MTI).
Settling Mars will require dramatic advances in biotech (to enable food production at scale on very limited land), artificial intelligence (to deal with a severe labor shortage), and advanced energy (to power an energy-intensive society without fossil fuels) as well as many other areas of research.
The MTI will develop these technologies and commercialize them for use on Earth. This will benefit our home planet while generating the revenue needed to create still more inventions. If successful, our ultimate goal is to create a network of new technology companies, with collectively both the know-how and the financial power to enable the human settlement of the Red Planet.
Here’s how it will work. The MTI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that will raise its initial capital by donations, all of which will be tax-deductible. We need your help with that. We do not expect that the scale of money obtained in this manner is enough to actually develop and commercialize new technologies.
But the MTI can use these funds to organize workshops, brainstorming sessions, and first order experimental demonstrations to identify and prove the fundamental feasibility key innovations and create business plans for spinoff companies to develop them. Then we will invite commercial investors to fund those companies, with the investors and the organization splitting the equity. You can read more about how this is going to work in the attached set of charts. But it all starts with you!
There will be a number of rewards for those who donate to MTI. If you give $100, we’ll send you a signed copy of Mars Society President Dr. Robert Zubrin’s next book, The New World on Mars: What Can We Create on the Red Planet due out early next year. Make it $250 and Dr. Zubrin will personally inscribe it to you. Make it $1000 or more and you will be designated a Mars Technology Institute Founder, and not only get an inscribed book, but a personal plaque that will certify your role in this historic endeavor. Contribute $5,000 or more, and in addition to all that, provided you are an accredited investor, you will be given a pro rata invitation to participate in first round private placement stock offerings of MTI spinoff companies, with $50,000 worth of stock offerings available for you to purchase at the first-round price for every $5,000 you donate.
To be clear, the MTI cannot guarantee right now that we will succeed in creating spin off companies, or, that if we do, you will find the technologies interesting, or the terms of investment offered attractive. Nor can we guarantee that any such companies, once launched, will ultimately be successful. Nothing great was ever accomplished without risk.
But we are going to do our level best to make this work. We invite you to join us on this greatest of all adventures!
Ad Martem Innovando! To Mars, by Invention!
