The Annual GDP of Mars After One Martian Year

It takes 687 Earth days for the planet Mars to complete an orbit around the Sun. That’s not quite two Earth years, it’s a little under one Earth year and 11 Earth months.

Which is relevant today because of a unique project we launched a little over two years ago. We recognized the arrival of the Mars Perseverance Rover on the planet with its ambitious plan to drill and collect rock samples represented something more than an expensive science experiment. It represented the birth of the Martian economy.

That’s because the plan for rock samples drilled by the rover was to store them in special containers on the surface of Mars for eventual return to Earth for scientific study. Or rather, these valuable goods produced by the rover would be placed into an inventory prior to being exported to Earth. These are all economic activities in which value is added to a raw product that can be accomplished by remotely operated or automated equipment.

But how much value has been added by these activities over the past Martian year? That’s a big question because the answer represents the gross domestic product for Mars. We were able to estimate a market value for the rock samples based on the auction prices of samples of meteorites found on Earth that were determined to have originated from Mars, so all we have to do is add up the number of samples that have been produced over the span of a Martian year.

For our purposes, we’re looking at a 687 day long period that runs from 12 July 2021 through 30 May 2023. During that period, Mars Perseverance Rover drilled and packaged 19 samples for future export to Earth. The following table tallies up the value of those future exports currently stored in inventory by the Martian quarter in which they were produced.

With only one sample collected during the entire Martian fourth quarter, we estimate the amount of Martian GDP for the entire Martian year is $1,779,948, which represents the average of the low and high end estimates we have for the value of the rock samples collected and stored by the rover, which range from $398,808 to $3,161,088.

Looking ahead to Mars’ future export economy, NASA and the European Space Agency reached an agreement to establish a sample transfer depot at the Three Forks location within Mars’ Jezero Crater. The Perseverence Rover will cache its full inventory of rock and atmospheric samples at the Three Forks Depot before their future export.

But that’s as far as they’ve gotten because of what has proven to be very bad planning by government space agencies, who failed to develop a viable plan for their export from Mars to Earth.

NASA’s audacious Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission has serious technical flaws and “unrealistic” assumptions about its budget and timetable, an independent review found in a report released yesterday. Originally estimated to cost some $4 billion, the reviewers found that NASA’s share of the mission could end up costing between $8 billion to $11 billion, and that launch could happen no sooner than 2030, 2 years later than now planned.

A joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), MSR would gather rocks collected by the Perseverance rover, which has been drilling samples since it landed on Mars in 2020. MSR would then rocket the samples off the planet and ferry them to Earth, where scientists would study them for signs of past life and planetary evolution. The top priority of planetary science for several decades, it remains a worthy goal and one still worth pursuing, especially in light of similar sample return plans for Mars planned by China for later this decade, according to the review report, which was commissioned by NASA.

But NASA won’t get there without dramatically rethinking how it runs the program and accepting the true cost. “MSR was established with unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning,” the report says. “As a result, there is currently no credible, congruent technical, nor properly margined schedule, cost, and technical baseline that can be accomplished with the likely available funding.” And proposed NASA budgets simply do not provide the funding needed to make the mission happen, it adds.

To put it simply, the space agencies’ sample return plan for the Martian rock samples was modeled on South Park’s underwear gnomes’ business plan:

• Phase 1: Collect Martian rock samples.
• Phase 2: ?
• Phase 3: Profit!

The space agencies are expected to present a recovery plan sometime later this year. For what it’s worth, they do believe the collected rock samples are valuable. The following short video describes what they hope to learn from them:

Previously on Political Calculations

• Meanwhile, on Mars…
• The Birth of the Martian Economy
• Mars Recovers from First Recessionary Event
• Mars’ GDP Triples in Martian 3Q

And just because Martians play a key role in it, here’s one more for fun!

• The Origin of Ancient Alien Theory

Image credit: Photo by NASA on Unsplash.