Every result the Foundation pays for is published without embargo, without a paywall and without a patent held back. This has been a condition of award since before the Foundation existed; it is why we have never had to ask anybody for data.
Seventy-five
years to Mars
The Foundation has been paying for the parts of going to Mars since 1951: instruments, atmosphere models, coatings, seals. The first crew leaves in the 2031 window.
Scroll1951
first endowment in the record
2000
year the Foundation was filed
512
grants awarded since filing
3,118
published results, nil embargoed
4.18bn
credits disbursed to date
2027
construction authorisation
Purpose clause, articles cl. 2
To advance, by patient and unglamorous means, the establishment of a permanent human presence beyond this planet; and to publish, without embargo or exception, everything it learns in the attempt.
It has not been amended since 14 March 2000, and the second half is the expensive half. Anyone will pay for a result. We also pay for the result that did not work, the calibration that made both of them worth trusting, and the printing.
The Foundation builds instruments and gives them away. It does not operate spacecraft it could instead fly on, and it does not buy a facility a university already has.
No programme is assessed on a horizon shorter than eight years. Nothing in the charter requires an announcement, and the Foundation has never held one.
The Foundation pays for the part of a mission nobody photographs: the seals, the coatings, the calibration targets, the bearing specification, the second detector that proves the first one. It has declined every naming right offered to it.
Programme LONGBOAT · PRO · 2022 →
Longboat
68 metres of reactor-electric transfer vessel, assembled in orbit, that never touches either surface. It has six berths and 142 tonnes of water forward of the crew, which the crew also drinks. Aurelio Banich proposed the arrangement in 1962; the dose it buys was measured in 2013 at 0.31 Sv for the crossing.
Programme PLUMBLINE · SUR · 2004–2021
From 312 sites
to three
The survey ran for 17 years and funded 46 instruments to settle where a permanent station should go. Thessaly Bench won on water, slope and dust, in that order.
Programme TENDER · PRO · 2023 →
Five windows
Cargo precedes crew by two windows in every case, and the vessel flies the crossing once with nobody aboard before it carries a crew.
- TDR-01Power plant, 1.4 MWe · 38.2 t
- TDR-02Sinter works and pad plant · 31.7 t
- TDR-03Consumables and spares cache · 26.4 t
- TDR-04Habitat shell 1 · 44.1 t
- TDR-05Habitat shell 2 · 44.1 t
- TDR-06Water plant and stores · 29.8 t
- LB-1 (U)Vessel, uncrewed shakedown transit
- LB-1 · crewedFirst crew of six · 258-day transit
- TDR-07Habitat shell 3 and crop article · 41.6 t
- LB-2 · crewedSecond crew of six · first return crew outbound relief
- TDR-08Industrial plant, second phase · 36.9 t
- LB-1 · crewedCrew rotation three · continuous occupation begins
- TDR-09Expansion shells 4–5 · 58.2 t
Opened 2026 · the next two problems
What has to work before 2031
Both programmes were opened in 2026. JOURNEYMAN builds the machines that prepare the site before the crew arrives. SEMAPHORE is trying to remove the light-lag, and may never produce anything.
Androids that finish the work first
Earth and Mars are 3 to 22 light-minutes apart, so a machine that has to ask permission waits the better part of an hour for it. JOURNEYMAN units run with nothing on Earth in the control loop. They use the same hatches, handholds and tool fittings as the 2031 crew, so that no tool has to be shipped in two versions. Four fly in the 2027 window, 24 in 2029, and 40 are to be on the ground before the first crew arrives.
A link with no wait in it
Every decision taken at Thessaly Bench will be taken by people who cannot be asked in time. SEMAPHORE was opened to change that, and no known mechanism permits it. Entanglement does not carry information, and the no-communication theorem is a proof, which engineering does not get round. Eleven lines of attack have been funded and 11 null results published, and the charter obliges us to report each year that we have failed.
We are aware of how this reads. We intend to keep funding it.
The prior record · 1951–1968
49 years before
we existed
The Foundation was filed in 2000 and takes credit for none of what came before it. But every specification we write today cites at least one paper from a chain of quiet endowments, and that chain starts with 47 photographic plates of Mars taken at Mount Sabel over three winters from 1951.
Publication covenant
3,118 published results, 206 of them negative, none embargoed
A grantee’s final report reaches publication in a median of 41 days. There has been one exception in our history, in 2011, and it went the other way: 11 days, because the result contradicted one of our own specifications and the people building to it needed to know.
The Foundation was endowed at filing and its fundraising line has read zero every year since. It has never run an appeal, held a press event or sold a naming right, and it does not intend to start.