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Makes me wonder if this is a potential funding stream for private Mars missions: Bring back a load of rocks, auction them off on Sotheby's. What would be the op

Makes me wonder if this is a potential funding stream for private Mars missions: Bring back a load of rocks, auction them off on Sotheby's. What would be the optimal amount to bring back to make a profit (or at least offset some of the costs) without tanking the price?

indoordin0saur 1y ago
Even without tanking the price something tells me there's not a huge market for mars rocks.
- autoexec 1y ago
  That can always be manufactured with enough money thrown into advertising. You can even make claims like how the rocks cure cancer and give people better erections if you're careful to do it in ways that can't be directly linked back to you.
  - indoordin0saur 1y ago
    Hmmm.... good idea. PM me. I think we'd be successful business partners.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
proteal 1y ago
If you are a monopoly producer (which seems fair in this context) you would set the price of the rocks where your marginal revenue equals your marginal demand. Loosely, you’d do a market survey to see what price the market would be willing to pay for a mars rock[0], then figure out your cost structure for bringing back one more kilo of rocks. You’d factor in cost to launch a rocket, fuel for the rocket, astronaut salaries, and don’t forget terrestrial costs like marketing and distribution! If you did a good enough job at predicting supply and demand, you wouldn’t actually care what the price of the product is because you would have claimed all the consumer surplus for yourself :) To specifically answer the optimal quantity question, the above answer implies that you would keep bringing rocks home until the cost to bring them back is higher than the price you set. To be clear, you could still go out and get more rocks and sell them for less and still make a profit, but you wouldn’t maximize your profit with that strategy. Competitive markets nudge behavior towards providing more product for less profit/cost which is why we love competition. [0] Planet money did a great podcast on how to actually do this. Here’s a link to a transcript (though listening is probably best): https://podscripts.co/podcasts/planet-money/how-much-for-that-egg https://podscripts.co/podcasts/planet-money/how-much-for-tha...
paxys 1y ago
The price is high because the rock is unique. Bring back more of them and they will become worthless.
- kulahan 1y ago
  I think you’d have to bring back quite a bit before Mars is no longer cool to own
  - ElevenLathe 1y ago
    But it's a fair consideration in that you would probably get much higher prices if you did a one-and-done Apollo-style mission, because the assumption would be that there aren't more coming, at least for a while. In that case, the world's billionaires are competing for status by owning one of a limited few (maybe only one?) Mars rocks. If you're clearly setting up a colony up there, then world's billionaires are only competing for temporary status, since there will eventually be more on the market, and they probably won't be whipped into a such a fervor in the bidding.

indoordin0saur 1y ago

Even without tanking the price something tells me there's not a huge market for mars rocks.

autoexec 1y ago
That can always be manufactured with enough money thrown into advertising. You can even make claims like how the rocks cure cancer and give people better erections if you're careful to do it in ways that can't be directly linked back to you.
- indoordin0saur 1y ago
  Hmmm.... good idea. PM me. I think we'd be successful business partners.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

proteal 1y ago

If you are a monopoly producer (which seems fair in this context) you would set the price of the rocks where your marginal revenue equals your marginal demand. Loosely, you’d do a market survey to see what price the market would be willing to pay for a mars rock[0], then figure out your cost structure for bringing back one more kilo of rocks. You’d factor in cost to launch a rocket, fuel for the rocket, astronaut salaries, and don’t forget terrestrial costs like marketing and distribution! If you did a good enough job at predicting supply and demand, you wouldn’t actually care what the price of the product is because you would have claimed all the consumer surplus for yourself :) To specifically answer the optimal quantity question, the above answer implies that you would keep bringing rocks home until the cost to bring them back is higher than the price you set. To be clear, you could still go out and get more rocks and sell them for less and still make a profit, but you wouldn’t maximize your profit with that strategy. Competitive markets nudge behavior towards providing more product for less profit/cost which is why we love competition. [0] Planet money did a great podcast on how to actually do this. Here’s a link to a transcript (though listening is probably best): https://podscripts.co/podcasts/planet-money/how-much-for-that-egg https://podscripts.co/podcasts/planet-money/how-much-for-tha...

paxys 1y ago

The price is high because the rock is unique. Bring back more of them and they will become worthless.

kulahan 1y ago
I think you’d have to bring back quite a bit before Mars is no longer cool to own
- ElevenLathe 1y ago
  But it's a fair consideration in that you would probably get much higher prices if you did a one-and-done Apollo-style mission, because the assumption would be that there aren't more coming, at least for a while. In that case, the world's billionaires are competing for status by owning one of a limited few (maybe only one?) Mars rocks. If you're clearly setting up a colony up there, then world's billionaires are only competing for temporary status, since there will eventually be more on the market, and they probably won't be whipped into a such a fervor in the bidding.