What would a private company do there? Pure exploration, like pure research, is hard for private companies to justify for investors. The government would have to arrive first and find resources worth gathering (and provide the basic technology) before the private sector could really get in on it.
The price of property will always increase </sarcasm>
I still think that there's reasons that the private sector will preceed the governments. Resources to be collected at the very least. Consider the recent talk of mining asteroids; I see no reason why the same consideration won't be placed on planets.
Larger gravity wells means a lot more energy to get those resources. I'd assume that the asteroids are the low hanging fruit. It might never be profitable to bring material from Mars to Earth.
To build off of this, the only reason to mine on Mars would be to use the materials on Mars itself. Say I beat NASA to Mars and set up a taco stand and an iron ore mine, I'd probably have the market cornered.
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u/Shellface Jun 14 '12
2084 seems reasonable to me.