Where the 10% goes

10% of gross proceeds

The Mars Territory LLC operating agreement commits the company to contribute 10% of all gross proceeds it receives to the Mars Territory Irrevocable Trust, for as long as the company exists. A parcel sold for $100 sends $10. On a later resale, where the company receives a 1% share, it sends 10% of that share. Each contribution is calculated when the sale happens and recorded against that sale.

This commitment is in the LLC's operating agreement, not in the Trust instrument, so it is a different kind of promise from the one below: company paperwork can be amended in whatever ways its own terms allow. What follows is the part an irrevocable instrument secures.

Where the money can end up

The Mars Territory Trust is irrevocable: it cannot be revoked or amended. The one change its trustee may make is to name a different beneficiary, and that beneficiary must be an organization conducted wholly or substantially to promote, facilitate, support, or advance the exploration and settlement of Mars.

So a dollar that reaches the Trust cannot come back to the company, and can only reach an organization advancing Mars exploration and settlement. The trustee may pay it out at any time, in whatever amount the work warrants. Nothing waits on travel to Mars becoming possible.

That is the whole guarantee. It fixes where the money goes. It does not fix an amount, a schedule, or the rate above.

A Quit Claim Deed from Mars Territory assigns the grantors' present and future claims in the ground it describes. No government recognizes anyone's claim to ground on Mars today, and every parcel page says so. What a deed holder holds is a position: a recorded, dated, verifiable assignment that would attach to a real interest if one ever arises.

Whether one ever arises is not a legal question first. It depends on whether people reach Mars, stay, and build enough that a framework for property has to be written. Until then there is nothing for a claim to attach to, and no paperwork changes that.

That is what the 10% is for. The same purchase that buys the claim funds the settlement effort that could one day make claims like it matter, and the Trust makes that credible: the money goes somewhere it cannot come back from, to an organization that can only spend it on Mars.

That is a reason to think the contribution is worth something, not a prediction. Nobody here promises that settlement will happen, that any future framework will recognize these deeds, or that a parcel will ever be worth more than was paid for it.