Mission and governance
The Foundation exists to do a single thing, and to say publicly what it learns while trying. Everything below — the divisions, the award process, the accounts, the buildings — is machinery in service of one clause that the board cannot rewrite.
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 · alterable only by unanimous resolution of the board with the founder present
A crewed crossing is not held up by ambition. It is held up by seals that gall in vacuum, coatings that darken under electrostatically held dust, a scrubber that fails on the ninth morning, and a bearing specification nobody wants to write. The Foundation funds those, and has since before it was a foundation.
It does not operate spacecraft. Where an instrument can fly on somebody else’s vehicle it flies on somebody else’s vehicle, which costs roughly two orders of magnitude less and returns the same numbers. Between 2004 and 2021 that arrangement bought 17 years of site survey, 46 funded instruments and 11 of them flown, without the Foundation owning a single lander.
It does not campaign for money. The Foundation was endowed at filing and its fundraising line has read zero every year since. It employs no fundraiser, has never run an appeal, and has declined every naming right it has been offered.
And it does not hurry. No programme is assessed on a horizon shorter than eight years, because a schedule that cannot survive four transfer windows is not a schedule. The record is public, including the four years in which we committed nothing at all.
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.
Governance
The Foundation is governed by a board of eight, chaired by the founder. Six seats are held by people who were grantees before they were governors; two are held for endowment and ethics. A quorum is five. The founder holds one vote and no reserved power beyond the chair.
Awards are decided by a panel of the Director of Research and four external reviewers, rotated every two rounds. Panel members abstain on anything touching their own institution, which in a field this small happens often enough that the abstention register is published with the awards.
The accounts are audited annually and published in full, including the years in which the Foundation underspent its plan. No programme has ever been funded out of a subsequent year’s income.
| Endowment at filing, 14 March 2000 | 1,200 | m credits |
| Endowment, current valuation | 6,940 | m credits |
| Disbursed since filing | 4,180 | m credits |
| Committed, 2027–2035 windows | 9,600 | m credits |
| Grants awarded since filing | 512 | awards |
| Institutions funded | 141 | in 31 jurisdictions |
| Programme spend as share of outgoings | 94.1 | per cent |
| Administration and governance | 4.6 | per cent |
| Fundraising | 0.0 | per cent |
| Naming rights sold since 1951 | 0 | none offered, none accepted |
Sums in credits. Percentages of total outgoings; the residual 1.3 per cent is the archive, which the Foundation declines to count as administration.
Divisions
A grant reference is MF, then the division, then the year, then the serial: MF-INS-2004-018 is the eighteenth award of 2004, made by Instrumentation. Records predating the Foundation carry a PR reference and were catalogued in 2001.
Facilities
The Foundation owns as little as it can. It holds a lease on the Aldern Works, a lease on the Cold Lab, and long-standing support arrangements with two institutions it has funded since the 1950s.
Flight hardware is built under contract at Sablefield Aerospace Works. The Foundation holds no share in it and competes the work each programme.