On Friday, applications closed for the Mars One project, which plans to put four astronauts on Mars in 2022.
There's just one catch - it's a one way ticket. They're never coming back to Earth.
But that hasn't stopped 165,000 people from across the world applying.
I think we could be looking at the next boom market for space signatures.
 They will never rival the value of Apollo 11 signatures, but autographs from the first four Mars astronauts could provide a nice nest egg |
Imagine owning the autograph of one of the chosen four. As soon as they take off, they will immediately be capping the market for their autograph. And as the first people to ever set foot on the Red Planet, their signatures will be sought after - make no mistake about it.
Ask yourself this question. If Neil Armstrong had set foot on the Moon but never returned, what price would his autograph be today? Far more than the £7,500 ($11,700) value detailed by the PFC40 Autograph Index.
Not only because the story would have fascinated collectors even more than the real life events, but because he wouldn't have had the opportunity to sign the hundreds of autographs he did after his return, before he stopped signing in 1994.
What we would have been left with is the famed Apollo 11 insurance covers. Because no life insurance company would insure them, the Apollo 11 crew signed around 1,000 postal covers before they set off, with the thought that their families could sell the covers if they never returned.
Around $5,000 would secure one of these for you today. Imagine what price they would achieve had the worst happened?
The identity of the first Mars One crew will not be announced until just months prior to the historic first mission, leaving us collectors with a limited time to act.
Diversify!
But before you plough all your savings into the first Mars astronauts, consider this.
Will they ever match the iconic nature of the space pioneers such as Yuri Gagarin or the Apollo 11 crew? Realistically, no. What those guys did was so daring, and so unlike anything that had gone before, that they will remain the holy grail for space collectors.
You may argue that becoming the first people to step foot on Mars is pretty pioneering, yet to me it feels more like a natural progression of man's space adventures than the daring feats of the first man in space and the first men on the Moon.
That's why, although the Mars astronauts' autographs could well be a nice bit of business for you and me, I won't be turning my back on the blue chips such as Apollo 11 mission signatures, which have grown in value by 14.3% per annum since 2000. After all, diversification is the name of the game!
See our Apollo 11 signatures for sale.
Thanks for reading,
Paul
