What exactly is the incentive for the private sector to go to Mars? For a company like spacex, the advantages are clear - if they can promote human space fligh

What exactly is the incentive for the private sector to go to Mars? For a company like spacex, the advantages are clear - if they can promote human space flight around the solar system, they stand to earn huge amounts of money providing the infrastructure/launches etc, so promoting a Mars Mission makes a lot of sense for them as a company. Even if it never happens they'd make lots of money from preparation, investigation of launch options and the renewed interest in human space flight. Of course that money has to come from somewhere, but I'm sure any such mission would attract all kinds of science missions and funding from national governments, particularly as it becomes clear they can pull it off. No-one will make money mining down a gravity well like Mars, but there are plenty of other reasons to go there and to other bodies in the solar system, even if only for short periods for scientific investigations. Of course you can do a lot with robots, and personally were I to be investing I'd invest in orbiters and landers, not human missions. The public would disagree though and national governments are more likely to fund a first man on mars than they are another rover. I think companies like planetary resources are also interesting as when one of them tows an asteroid back to earth orbit and starts mining and sending lumps of metal with a heat shield back to earth, or mining for reaction mass and selling it in orbit, that might be a game changer. Going back as far as the colonization of the New World, high risk and expensive exploration has traditionally been funded by governments. I'm not sure that is entirely true - as a counterpoint, consider the East India company, or the Hudson's Bay Company, there are lots of examples of private exploration, and many examples of private individuals simply seeking funding from governments for an enterprise they had already decided upon, so it's hardly fair to characterise exploration as uniquely government funded. Maybe when I a see private sector company at least get a human into LEO This is already scheduled to happen soon - they're testing human-rated capsules at spacex for example, so it's looking probable over the next few years given the pressure to remove dependence on Russia for the ISS.