Back in 2012, Mars One announced plans to try and colonise Mars. Those that take part in the history-making first trip will do so with the knowledge that they will never return alive to planet Earth.
68. Say (O Muhammad ) "O people of the Scripture
(Jews and Christians)! You have nothing (as regards guidance) till you act
according to the Taurat (Torah), the Injeel (Gospel), and what has (now) been
sent down to you from your Lord (the Qur'an)." Verily, that which has been
sent down to you (Muhammad ) from
your Lord increases in many of them their obstinate rebellion and
disbelief. So be not sorrowful over the people who disbelieve.
69. Surely, those who believe (in the Oneness of Allah, in His Messenger
Muhammad and all that was
revealed to him from Allah), those who are the Jews and the Sabians and the
Christians, - whosoever believed in Allah and the Last Day, and worked
righteousness, on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve. 5. Surah Al-Ma'idah (The Table Spread with Food)
It takes a certain kind of person to sign up to such a trip, buthey weren’t short on willing participants. From more than 200,000 people who hoped to leave Earth and die on Mars, only 660 remain in the running. Those that are left now face a more testing astronaut selection process.
For those who make the final cut and earn a seat on the Mars One mission, the one-way trip to the red planet set for take-off in 2024.
What kind of person would sign up to something knowing that they would never come back? Let’s take a closer look
Meet Ryan MacDonald, Dina Masodi and Jeremias Naiene.
These are three of the men and women who hope to make the historic trip.
Ryan is a physics student from the UK.
More about Ryan:
- He can recite 90 digits of Pi. (Easy, 3.14….uhm, ok)
- Ryan’s never had the desire to have sex and has never kissed anyone. You’d think this will help him as he is unlikely to fall in love before take off, but on the flip side if they are trying to colonise, doesn’t reproduction come into it?
- When Ryan was two years old, his father abandoned him and his sister. His most traumatic times in life resulted from the abandonment. He says that going to Mars would be like abandoning everyone, which might make it hard to do.
- The reason he wants to find a life on Mars is to leave behind a legacy. He will definitely do that should it be a success.
Dina is an Iraqi-American computer science graduate
More about Dina:
- When she left her family in Iraq, she knew it was forever. She feels going to Mars and leaving Earth forever will be a similar experience.
- Dina believes that “love” is just an emotional need. She says it’s not something she believes in or needs. You have to feel sorry for any guys that have fallen for her, she is clearly not the relationship commitment type.
- Asked if she thinks a person has to be crazy to agree to go to Mars. For her, it’s only as “crazy” as getting married, having kids and dying.
Jeremias is a doctor from Mozambique.
More about Jeremias:
- He feels that there are major problems on Earth that are now unsolvable — and that the answer is to start from the beginning again… on a new planet.
- If he falls in love before he goes, he thinks it will be a problem because he can’t control or avoid falling in love. But, he says he’ll try to stop the feelings.
The budget and timeline for plans by a Dutch organisation to colonise Mars are highly unrealistic, one of the project’s most eminent supporters has suggested.
Gerard ’t Hooft, a Dutch Nobel laureate and ambassador for Mars One, said he did not believe the mission could take off by 2024 as planned.
“It will take quite a bit longer and be quite a bit more expensive. When they first asked me to be involved I told them ‘you have to put a zero after everything’,” he said, implying that a launch date 100 years from now with a budget of tens of billions of dollars would be an achievable goal. But, ’t Hooft added, “People don’t want something 100 years from now.”
Last week the organisation announced its shortlist of 100 applicants, including five British hopefuls, to be the first members of a permanent human colony on the red planet.
According to the Mars One’s official timeline, a stationary lander and satellite will be sent to Mars in 2018, followed by a rover in 2020 and cargo missions starting in 2022. Humans would start arriving in 2025, and crews of four would be sent every two years to add to the settlement.
Bas Lansdorp, the founder of Mars One, remains upbeat about the prospects of the mission, which he is hoping to fund by selling rights to film it for a reality television series to be made by Endemol, the Dutch producer of Big Brother. “Don’t forget that when Kennedy announced the Moon mission he had less time,” Lansdorp, who has a background in mechanical engineering, told the Guardian.
Scientists, though, have remained doubtful that the mission will get beyond the hypothetical stage, citing its lack of funding and the lack of a spacecraft or habitat suitable for supporting life on a long-term mission.
A recent analysis by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) identified crucial flaws with Mars One’s published plans and predicted that even if the astronauts got to the surface unscathed, the first person would suffocate within 68 days because of a lack of equipment to balance oxygen levels effectively.
T’Hooft, of Utrecht University, said he was concerned by the findings. “I understand the scepticism very well. People from outside will say ‘wait a minute, you have to be careful with what you’re doing and what you’re claiming’. Maybe there’s a need to reassess,” he said.
He added that the “proper thing” would be for Mars One to publish its own analysis to demonstrate that their own more favourable projections about life on the Red Planet were sound.
Despite being sceptical about the details, t’Hooft said he still supported the project’s overall goals. “Let them be optimistic and see how far they get,” he said.
Sydney Do, a graduate student at MIT and part of a team who tested the feasibility of the proposals, said they quickly realised that many of the technologies that were integral to the plan were not available or even under development. “There’s no deep-space habitat in development, there’s no lander in development,” he said.
The calculations highlight the complexity of simply trying to balance the gas levels inside the inflatable capsule in which the astronauts would reside. The amount of CO2 exhaled by the astronauts is not enough to keep the plants alive and if you manage to pump in enough CO2 from the outside, the amount of O2 produced by the crops is too great, creating a fire risk.
The first astronaut would suffocate within 68 days, in the absence of a new machine capable of selectively pumping oxygen out of an environment, the MIT study suggests. The assessment also estimated that an area of about 200 square metres would be needed to grow food to support four people, compared with the 50 square metres that Mars One estimates would be needed to feed 12 astronauts.
Do said that Mars One representatives had treated the findings with a “mix of defensiveness and condescension”. “They haven’t provided any concrete dispute with the findings,” he said. “They’re not being as transparent as they should be, especially when human life is at risk here.”
Lansdorp said the MIT analysis had included “preposterous decisions” on the design of the simulation, which had led to incorrect conclusions. He said these would be challenged by a new assessment by Paragon Space Corporation, commissioned by Mars One. “They’ve been wrapping up their own study, which will be out in early March. They called the MIT analysis ‘very naive’,” he said.
There was potential for delays to the timeline, said Lansdorp, but added that he believed a 2024 launch was achievable in theory. “When we had to put back the launch date from 2023 to 2024, my co-founder said ‘great, our first delay. We’re starting to look like a real space mission’.”
Mars One is a not-for-profit organization based in the Netherlands that has put forward conceptual plans to establish a permanent human colony on Mars by 2025,[1] also planning on having the first humans land on Mars, and beating NASA's Orion missions by a decade.[2] The private spaceflight project is led byDutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, who announced plans for the Mars One mission in May 2012.[3]
Mars One's original concept included launching a robotic lander and orbiter as early as 2016 to be followed by a human crew of four in 2022. Organizers plan for that crew, selected from thousands of applicants who paid an administrative fee, to become the first residents of Mars with every step of the crew’s journey will be documented for a reality television program which would partially fund the project. In February 2015, the primary contractors on the robotic missions confirmed that work had ended on those missions with the completion of contracts on initial studies.[4]
The project's schedule, technical and financial feasibility as well as ethics have been criticized by scientists and those in the aerospace business.
Planning for Mars One began in 2011 with discussions between the two founders, Bas Lansdorp and Arno Wielders. The feasibility of the idea was then researched with specialists and expert organizations, which discussed the financial,psychological and ethical aspects of it.[5]
The Mars One project has no connection with Inspiration Mars, a similarly-timed project to send a married couple on a Mars flyby and return them to Earth over a period of 500 days.[6]
Initial mission plan status[edit]
Mars One publicly announced plans in May 2012 for a one-way trip to Mars, with plans for an initial robotic precursor mission in 2016 and transporting the first human colonists to Mars in 2023.[7]
In December 2013, Mars One announced plans for a robotic precursor mission in 2018, two years later than had been conceptually planned in the 2012 announcements. The robotic lander is to be "built by Lockheed Martin based on the design used for NASA’s Phoenix and InSight missions, as well as a communications orbiter built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd."[14] In February 2015, Lockheed Martin and Surrey Satellite Technology confirmed that contracts on the initial study phase begun in late 2013 had run out and additional contracts had not been received for further progress on the robotic missions. Plans have not been disclosed to raise the US$200 million or more needed to support the robotic mission.[4][14]
Mars One selected a second-round pool of astronaut candidates in 2013 of 1058 people—"586 men and 472 women from 107 countries"—from a larger number of some 200,000 who showed interest on the Mars One website.
Mars One announced a partnership with Uwingu on 3 March 2014, stating that the program would use Uwingu's map of Mars in all of their planned missions.[15][16] Kristian von Bengtson began work on Simulation Mars Home for crew on 24 March 2014.
The second-round pool was whittled down to 705 candidates (418 men and 287 women) in the beginning of May 2014. 353 were removed either for medical reasons or due to personal considerations.[17] These selected persons will then begin the interview process following which several teams of two men and two women will be compiled. The teams will then begin training full-time for a future mission to Mars, while individuals and teams may be selected out during training if they are not deemed suitable for the mission.[17]
On June 2, 2014, Darlow Smithson Productions (DSP) announced it has gained exclusive access to the Mars One.[18]
On June 30, 2014, it was made public that Mars One seeks financial investment through a bidding process to send company experiments to Mars. The experiment slots will go to the highest bidder and will include company related ads, and the opportunity to have the company name on the robotic lander that's scheduled to carry the experiments to Mars in 2018.[19]
Mars One selected a third-round pool of astronaut candidates in 2015 of 100 people—" 50 men and 50 women who successfully passed the second round. The candidates come from all around the world, namely 39 from the Americas, 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, 7 from Africa, and 7 from Oceania".
According to their April 2013 schedule, the first crew of four astronauts would arrive on Mars in 2025, after a seven-month journey from Earth. Additional teams would join the settlement every two years, with the intention that by 2033 there would be over twenty people living and working on Mars.[citation needed] The astronaut selection process began on 22 April 2013.[20]
As of April 2013, the astronaut selection process was expected by Mars One to be completed in July 2015; six teams of four.[20]
2018 unmanned lander mission[edit]
In December 2013, mission concept studies for an unmanned Mars mission were contracted with Lockheed Martin and Surrey Satellite Technology for a demonstration mission to be launched in 2017 and land on Mars in 2018. It would be based on the design of the successful 2007 NASA Phoenix lander,[21] and provide proof of concept for a subset of the key technologies for a later permanent human settlement on Mars.[22] Upon submission of Lockheed Martin's Proposal Information Package,[21] Mars One released a Request for Proposals[23] for the various payloads on the lander. The total payload mass of 44 kg is divided among the seven payloads as follows:[23]
- Water extraction (10 kg)
- Soil acquisition (15 kg)
- Thin film solar power demonstrator (6 kg)
- Camera system (5 kg)
- Open for random proposals from the highest bidder (4 kg)
- Educational payload (2 kg)
- Winning university experiment (2 kg)
Progress on the lander/orbiter mission ended in 2015 with the completion of contracts on the initial study phase.[4]
2020 unmanned lander mission[edit]
In 2020, an unmanned rover will be launched to Mars in order to pick a landing site for the 2025 Mars One landing and a site for the Mars One colony. At the same time, a communication satellite will be launched, enabling continuous communication with the Mars One colony.[24]
2022 cargo mission launch[edit]
In 2022, the cargo mission will be launched, containing two life-support units, and two supply units.[24]
2024 Mars One launch[edit]
A spacecraft containing four astronauts will be launched for Mars.[24]
2025 Mars One landing[edit]
In 2025, the landing module will land on Mars, containing four astronauts. They will be met by the rover launched in 2020, and taken to the Mars One colony.[24]
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