The Mars Foundation is a non-profit filed on 14 March 2000 to establish a permanent human presence beyond this planet. We fund instruments, research and launches. We publish everything we pay for. We have never bought a spacecraft we could instead fly an instrument on, and we do not hold press events.
Figures as at the 2026 audited accounts. Sums in credits. Grants counted from registration; the prior record of 1951–1968 is catalogued separately and is not counted here.
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.
Adopted 14 March 2000. Unamended. The only clause the board cannot alter by ordinary resolution.
Two obligations, in one sentence. The first is the reason the Foundation exists. The second is the reason it can afford the first: because every result we fund is published in full, we have never had to buy access to anybody’s data, and we have never had to argue with a collaborator about who owns a finding.
It also means the Foundation publishes work that embarrasses it. Four years of the record contain no commitments at all. They are in the history too.
The Foundation was filed in 2000, but the work it was built on starts in 1951 with a mountain observatory whose grant had lapsed. The history is the fullest document we publish: every era, every programme, the people, the grant numbers, and the years in which nothing happened.
They were practice before they were policy. Three of the four were being followed in the 1950s by people who had never met each other.
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.
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. Ownership is overhead; instruments are the work.
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. A schedule that survives four transfer windows is worth more than a schedule that reads well.
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.
Twelve programmes have been opened since 1969. Six are open. A programme closes when its charter end condition is met, and PLUMBLINE is the reason that clause exists: it finished, and was closed rather than extended.
| Code | Div. | Programme | Opened | Lead | Spend, m cr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CANOPY | SUR | Dust opacity and deposition | 2011 | Dr Gideon Sarr | 8 |
| KILN | MAT | In-situ materials and sintering | 2014 | Dr Zhao Wenyi | 22 |
| HEARTHSTONE | LIF | Closed-loop life support | 2015 | Dr Anselm Vogt | 38 |
| DAYBOOK | ARC | Archive and publication | 2018 | Naomi Vance | 4 |
| LONGBOAT | PRO | Crewed transfer vessel | 2022 | Tiago Mendes-Ruiz | 116 |
| TENDER | PRO | Logistics and launch cadence | 2023 | Dr Nour Habib | 31 |
Sixty-eight metres, six berths, a reactor-electric stage and a hundred and forty-two tonnes of water forward doing two jobs at once. It is assembled in orbit from articles built at the Aldern Works and it never touches either surface.
Tied to the transfer windows, which are not negotiable. Cargo precedes crew by two windows in every case. Nobody is sent to a site that does not already have power, water, shelter and a spare of each.
Flights marked with a dark rule carry crew. Transit 258 days nominal. None of this is a promise; it is a schedule, and the Foundation publishes the dates it misses in the same place as the dates it keeps.
Eight divisions, two award rounds a year, and a proposal form that asks for six pages and will not read a seventh. The Foundation funds the unphotographed part of a mission: seals, coatings, calibration targets, the second detector that proves the first one.
Awards carry one condition, and it is not negotiable: publication in full, without embargo, including negative results.
The Foundation is endowed, spends no money on fundraising, and has never run a campaign. This site cannot take a payment and does not ask for one.
What is genuinely useful to us is work, data and criticism — and telling somebody that the coatings library from 1959 is still open for anybody to read.