Mars One Selects Second Round Candidate Astronauts 216
First time accepted submitter techfilz writes "The Mars One Project has selected 1058 second round candidates out of more than 200 000 applicants from over 140 countries. There are another two selection rounds to go before the lucky few get a one way trip to Mars. Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years to begin a human settlement partly funded by crowdsourcing and a reality TV show."
Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know, I know, everyone is going to be dogpiling Mars One for feasability, but...
The shoestring budget they'll get out of crowdsourcing and a TV show will launch people into space just long enough to kill them.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
The shoestring budget they'll get out of crowdsourcing and a TV show will launch people into space just long enough to kill them.
Sounds like the gladiatorial arenas of Rome, except we're doing it in space. Send our "braves" in and watch them get slaughtered to the sounds of clapping and cheering. Oh sorry, forgot... we've evolved beyond the need to watch people get killed for our entertainment, right?
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forgot... we've evolved beyond the need to watch people get killed for our entertainment, right?
of course not, havent you seen any of damn near every movie hollywood puts out? we all love watching people get killed
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Right. Because none of us know that movies like totally aren't real and shit.
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Right. Because none of us know that movies like totally aren't real and shit.
I don't think the Romans cared about the "realness" of the games; that is, they didn't watch the gladiators because they personally wanted those people dead. If you're far enough removed emotionally from the participants (which the Romans certainly were), being at the Colosseum for them was like being at the movies for us.
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I understand that it could be dangerous, but do you really think it's so dangerous that we are being willfully ignorant and sending people to their deaths?
"danger" (Score:3)
Critics of Mars One are not criticizing the notion of human colonization of Mars purely from a "danger" perspective...
It's everything about ***how*** Mars One plans to do this...from the funding to the equipment they use to what they'll actually do when they get there. It just makes no sense to do it that way.
Sure there are some critics of human space exploration that think the whole notion of humans colonizing other worlds is just too dangerous, *no matter how it is done* but they are in the distinct minor
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's kind of the point. They'll be making a reality tv show to make some people some big bucks down here on Earth. Then launch the corpses into space.
I wonder if life insurance policies can be terminated for getting selected to be on that show :)
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, Neil Armstrong was not able to get life insurance before the Apollo mission, where they had a 50% chance of returning alive. He signed hundreds of photos for his wife to sell for $50 each (or something like that). He tried to make sure she had enough to survive on if he died by selling his autographs.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.businessinsider.com/neil-armstrong-couldnt-afford-life-insurance-so-this-would-have-taken-care-of-his-family-if-he-died-2012-8 [businessinsider.com]
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You all do realise that this is probably just a Reality TV hoax right? along the same lines as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadets_(TV_series) [wikipedia.org]
Likely they will 'train' the winners then put them in a 'ship' with no windows and which happens to have gravity due to the 'acceleration' needed and film them with 100 hidden cameras...
They may even 'land' them in an isolated desert somewhere for a while...
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This show has already been done.
Capricorn One [wikipedia.org]
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it'll even get them that far. There's the aspect of having a man-rated craft, a man-rated booster, and a man-rated habitat to deploy once getting there. If these three things aren't met then they can't even launch.
You know why military contractors don't usually change products, even when they're obsolete? Because it costs a lot of money to re-certify those products, especially things with life-support or energetic applications. You can't change even something as trivial as going from an SAE thread pattern on a hole drilled in a mounting ear to a metric thread pattern without re-qualifying, if that hole was provided pre-tapped. There are old products that have been granted exemptions to environmental law specifically because it's less costly to pay the environmental waiver than it is to qualify a new material or process that isn't bad for the environment.
If they can't demonstrate that they can launch a crew, convey them to their destination, and provide them with some form of functional shelter then they will never get off the ground.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even in failure, Mars One will teach us things we didn't know before, and lay the groundwork for future endeavors. If this isn't a worthy goal, I don't know what is. If they succeed, all the better.
What I don't understand is the people saying they shouldn't even try. I'm just glad our ancestors didn't think that way.
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No one is saying that no one should try to get to Mars. That's completely different to pointing out that this is an obvious scam.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is the people saying they shouldn't even try. I'm just glad our ancestors didn't think that way.
People say they shouldn't try because they don';t think that it's a credible attempt. We won't learn anything from it that we didn't already know (mainly, that it's not a good idea to base a manned space mission on plans for a reality TV show envisioned by two guys with marketing degrees and no understanding of science), and it'll poison the well for future legitimate attempts ("we already fell for that mars one scam, what makes you think we'll fall for your copycat attempt and sponsor you too?").
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Who said he was an MBA?
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What I don't understand is the people saying they shouldn't even try
It's not that they shouldn't try, it's that they shouldn't waste everyone's time on what is so obviously a publicity stunt. No one is ever going to get to Mars with this plan.
Are you telling me that four years from now their launch vehicle, spacecraft, landing craft and habitation structures will be built and ready to be deployed? That the BILLIONS of dollars this endeavour will cost will have been raised?
Virgin Galactic hasn't even
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between you and I is that I don't know if it will work. You seem convinced there's no point in even trying. You're like somebody saying a ship will fall off the edge of the world if they sail off beyond the horizon. I'm saying, let's go find out.
Virgin is a for-profit company concerned very much with image. Their business model is entirely based around getting people back to Earth again safely. They're inherently risk-averse, because their passengers are paying to get home again.
NASA and other world space agencies lack the political support to do much of anything at all, and they are even more risk-averse than a company is, because what little support they do get is the result of a fickle public that's terrified of dead astronauts.
It seems to me, Mars One is a different beast entirely. It's a one way trip, and they seem very up front about the risk. I'm sure all 1058 volunteers in the second round are keenly aware they may die at any stage in this experiment, and have accepted that risk. It's a privately-funded, non-profit entity that doesn't need to worry about public approval, just public interest.
As for figuring it all out, we've known how to get to Mars for decades now. We've made great strides in landing technology, and awareness of radiation exposure with the latest Mars rover, among other missions. Their efforts to build the habitation structures on Mars will happen before they ever launch a live colonist, so if they can't do it, nobody will even be put at risk. Regardless of outcome, we'll have learned a great deal, found out where our limits are, and maybe pushed them a bit further.
Frankly I'm fed up with the complacency of this species, at everyone's willingness to just stay put on our fragile little world, and never try anything hard or dangerous. At least these guys are trying. Maybe they're naive, maybe they've under-budgeted and this will cost a lot more than they think, maybe things will go wrong, maybe some brave explorers will die. At least they'll have found where our limits are, instead of just guessing and naysaying when somebody thinks they can do better than those who came before.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference between you and I is that I don't know if it will work. You seem convinced there's no point in even trying.
Nope, he's not saying there's no point anyone trying. He's stating that these specific people are scammers and there is not point in them wasting people's time because all it will do is hurt the credibility of anyone else who will try.
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What exactly is the scam? It's a non-profit organization, the risks are well known, and if it all blows up nobody's a winner. Well, the only winners will be the ones who learn from what went wrong and do a better attempt next time.
And whose credibility, exactly, will be harmed if this doesn't work? Another group trying the exact same thing you'd also disapprove of for the same reasons you disapprove of Mars One? Surely, this wouldn't harm the credibility of another company with a much larger budget and long
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What exactly is the scam?
Them taking money from idiots in order to put on a reality show to make themselves more money while the whole "mission" never happens because there's no possible way they can pull this off.
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Frankly I'm fed up with the complacency of this species, at everyone's willingness to just stay put on our fragile little world, and never try anything hard or dangerous.
The objection isn't to trying things that are hard and dangerous.
The objection is to doing obviously stupid shit that has zero chance of working.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah yes, the "let's fix our problems here at home first" argument. I hate to break it to you, but we will always have problems. Humans have always had problems and we excel at finding new ones no matter how many old ones we solve. We can either choose to keep working at fixing them, for billions of years as we colonize the universe, or we can wait for the next extinction event in a much shorter time span and have a permanent solution.
I'm imagining a caveman not so long ago saying that we shouldn't cross that river until we figure out how to live off the resources in a one-hour walking radius around our cave.
You know what would really advance our ability to live here on Earth? Figuring out how to live in environments totally hostile to our way of life. Terraforming another planet will teach us how to live in balance with nature here. Learning how to conserve and recycle resources on another world, where we have no choice but to do so, will help us be sustainable on Earth. You clearly look at this as a win-lose proposition. Money spent on space exploration is money not spent here at home. But the fact is, space exploration helps us here at home. It helps our economy, it gives us new technologies that work here just as well on Earth, it does a lot.
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Someone wishing to go to Mars cannot rely
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You know why military contractors don't usually change products, even when they're obsolete? Because it costs a lot of money to re-certify those products, especially things with life-support or energetic applications.
I suppose that as a private company, they could try the "Kerbal Space Program" approach -- skip the re-certifications in favor of building a large number of spacecraft inexpensively, in the hopes that at least one of them will make it. 1058 volunteers at four to a spaceship gives them 264 chances, and only one has to succeedâ¦. ;)
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If they can't demonstrate that they can launch a crew, convey them to their destination, and provide them with some form of functional shelter then they will never get off the ground.
How so? Who's going to stop them?
I think the real issue here is screening 1058 suicidal or terminal maniacs with a death wish out of 200k suicidal or terminal maniacs with an even greater death wish, and hope that somehow out of those a useful crew will be able to run a friggin' spaceship. To Mars. And build the foundations of a colony. On Mars.
An astronaut is usually a pilot, AND a glorified lab manager, AND an engineer, AND physically superfit, AND possesses iron willpower, and his balls are probably made
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As author of a space systems engineering textbook ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods [wikibooks.org] ) and formerly working for Boeing on the Space Station project, it's obvious to me they really have not thought through reliability and logistics.
For example, they want to land the modules 5-10 km away from the base location, because that's the landing error circle for current technology, and the landing rockets can do serious damage if you land too close. Then supposedly a rover will pi
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Funny)
You're simply looking at this through the wrong perspective. This is a new and innovative way to win a Darwin Award.
Why does it have to be 100% safe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Going on ANY ocean voyage before the 20th century was risky in a whole bunch of ways. The food might kill you. The weather might kill you. The ship might kill you. Someone else you run across on the water might kill you. The crew might kill you. Whatever you run into wherever you go might kill you, be it people, animals, or geography.
Why the hell would we hold launching a rocket across the solar system to another planet to elementary school safety standards? Of course you could be killed. Climbing into a metal tube filled with 7 million pounds of rocket fuel and lighting it is inherently dangerous, even more so when you plan to travel across 40 million miles of space.
If we wait until it's as safe as riding an elevator we'll never get there. Exploration should never wait until it's proven safe.
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There is a big difference between 100% safe and 1% safe. This Mars mission is much closer to the latter and therefore a scam. The problem is that if anything goes wrong they are dead as they have no backup or hope of rescue.. I put their chance of surviving more than 5 years at about 5%.
Re:Why does it have to be 100% safe? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a big difference between 100% safe and 1% safe
Yes, but there was no way to tell that a couple hundred years ago. His point about exploration is valid. Did Columbus really have any way of saying it was an 18% "safe" expedition? How do you even begin to quantify those risks with the information they had then?
So many of the great explorers had absolutely no idea what the dangers were going to be, only that they would face them.
The fact that we can begin to quantify the risks is turning us into pussies. Would the next Chuck Yeager break the light speed barrier if some egghead said there was a proven 23.234% chance his nuts would shrivel up and fall off?
It's not like this is some sort of a redneck hold-my-beer stunt. They're only going to go if they have met a minimum amount of safety standards and have access to some pretty impressive technologies to bring with them.
Fucking Columbus didn't even understand biology and antibiotics, knew that people got very sick and died on long voyages, and still boarded the boat. Lewis and Clark had no idea what to expect going across the US. Whatever chance they had, it was going to be with their wits and what they brought with them.
The unknown that previous explorers faced was a lot more intimidating than the journey being contemplated by Mars One.
Telling somebody that has vastly more information and technology at their fingertips that they are morons for even attempting something like that is a little offensive, IMO. If you want to do that, then you must say that all of our great explorers in the past simply missed out on being awarded their Darwin Awards.
Man Up.
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Acceptable risk != suicide
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"Why the hell would we hold launching a rocket across the solar system to another planet to elementary school safety standards? Of course you could be killed. Climbing into a metal tube filled with 7 million pounds of rocket fuel and lighting it is inherently dangerous,"
Especially if it has been built by the cheapest bidder.
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Everything NASA has ever done was built by the cheapest bidder.
Our bridges were built by the cheapest bidders.. and it shows. Our software is built by the cheapest bidders.. and it shows too in many ways.
It didn't stop NASA from getting all the way to the Moon.
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Nobody is asking it for it to be 100% safe, that's a strawman of your own creation.
That being said, you've missed the OP's point - which is that this plan isn't unsafe, it isn't even risky, it's inherently suicidal with essentialy zero chance of success.
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If we wait until it's as safe as riding an elevator we'll never get there. Exploration should never wait until it's proven safe.
We never did. The chance of being killed on a shuttle mission was about 1.5:100 and those who were actually riding the thing and working on it knew that.
Sure they will (Score:2)
Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years to begin a human settlement partly funded by crowdsourcing and a reality TV show."
[cough]Bullshit[/cough]
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You know, I want to believe this will happen, but I really can't. I don't mean the Mars One thing, in general, just the timeline of it. 2018 is crazy.
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It can be done in 2018 if you had ~$10 billion and you're willing to launch without "man-rating" certification of your booster.
Falcon Heavy is coming along nicely and they could probably do a launch in 4 years if you prodded Elon with a few billion dollars. Throw another $5 billion or so for the spacecraft/lander/habitat and you could have one that will theoretically work (even if unproven).
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It can be done in 2018 if you had ~$10 billion and you're willing to launch without "man-rating" certification of your booster.
Falcon Heavy is coming along nicely and they could probably do a launch in 4 years if you prodded Elon with a few billion dollars. Throw another $5 billion or so for the spacecraft/lander/habitat and you could have one that will theoretically work (even if unproven).
Who crowdfunded $10B? So far in 20 days they have $100,000, so they only need what another 19,980 days to get there...
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Oh man, I didn't think about it until now, but "every 2 years" makes absolutely no sense. They'd be launching at furthest approach. They'll turn year long trips into multi-year trips, and all the provisioning that will require.
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2 years is based on how many episodes of their reality tv show should play before they select a set of new "winners"
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buuuut....
http://www.universetoday.com/14824/distance-from-earth-to-mars/ [universetoday.com]
May. 22, 2016 – 75.3 million km (46.8 million miles)
Jul. 27. 2018 – 57.6 million km (35.8 million miles)
Oct. 13, 2020 – 62.1 million km (38.6 million miles)
Looks like every 2 years is about the closest points anyways.
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Except it doesn't work that way. The spacecraft doesn't move in a straight line and while mars and earth might be that close instantaneously, the rocket will need to head for where mars WILL be when they get there. They want to launch to minimize travel distance and time, not minimize the distance between the two planets.
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ok, add 2 months.. it's still 2 years apart regardless.
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If one is cyclic, which it is, then so is the other; it's just a matter of the phase difference - how much it leads or lags.
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Re:Sure they will (Score:5, Funny)
"Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years to bury the previous four..."
Fixed.
Waste not, want not (Score:4, Funny)
"Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years to bury the inedible parts of the previous four..."
Fixed^2
River Tam says (Score:2)
"You're worried that we're going to run out of food. But that's not going to happen. ... We'll freeze to death first."
Re: River Tam says (Score:2)
air, not food. and she was wong, space is a great insulator.
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I was changing her phrasing around to match GGP's cannibalism theme. Apparently, you missed that.
Re:Sure they will (Score:5, Informative)
According to the Mars One website, the first crews leave in 2024. As in *not* 2018
http://www.mars-one.com/mission/roadmap/2024 [mars-one.com]
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Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years to begin a human settlement partly funded by crowdsourcing and a reality TV show."
[cough]Bullshit[/cough]
Eventually the pile of corpses will provide sufficient material to create a viable biosphere.
First astronauts to land in 2025 (Score:5, Informative)
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Yeah, okay. That's much more reasonable. Four astronauts blasting off for Mars in 2018, as awesome as that'd be, just makes no sense.
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I guess Apollo managed to ramp up in 7 years, but that's still an absurdly compact time-table for a tiny venture. I want to see success, and be optimisitic, but this feels like a "too good to be true, so it probably isn't" pipe dream.
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At least they're keeping this in the news, in the public consciousness. I get depressed at how little interest there seems to be in trying the hard things, in sending humans farther away than they've ever gone before, in breaking speed records, in exploring new frontiers.
Will Mars One work? I hope so, with ever fiber in my being. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but either way it will advance human knowledge, and maybe push our limits just a little bit further. What I don't understand is the people saying
A scam for the gullible (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is the people saying they shouldn't even try.
The problem isn't that someone shouldn't try. The problem is that we know a fair bit about how difficult an endeavor this is and what a credible effort would have to look like. We know that the technology to do this just isn't there yet and there is no credible evidence that it will be in the next 5-10 years. Sending even an unmanned probe to mars costs billions of dollars. These people are claiming their are going to send people there inside of 12 years? And they are going to do this by crowdsourcing what amounts to a suicide mission? Your bullshit detector should be in high alert.
This just reeks of a scam to separate gullible people from their money.
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How exactly, does it reek of a scam? The technology has existed for decades, and in recent years we've learned a lot more. The only reason we haven't done it already is because NASA lacks the political support, and the public is terrified of even the slightest risk.
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You missed a major issue. Most people are not willing to spend billions to send people on a suicide mission to Mars for no gain. Thee is nothing that people can do that can't be done with rovers and for a much lower cost.
Re:A scam for the gullible (Score:5, Interesting)
The technology has existed for decades
Actually, no.
We can send robots to Mars, but we still don't have the technology to send people there -
- A craft that can support people for the ~200-day journey to Mars through interplanetary space (including protecting them from ionizing radiation) has never been built and we don't know how.
- The creation of a landing craft is a tremendous challenge. Granted, Mars One is 'supposedly' a one-way trip so many of these issues are mitigated, but assuming the astronauts would want to come home you need to launch from the surface of Mars and then return to earth. No craft that has ever landed on Mars has returned to terra firma.
Wired had a good overview of these issues here -
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/31/getting-to-mars [wired.co.uk]
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Agreed. And if they do send people those people will almost certainly starve or suffocate.
Biosphere 2 is our best attempt at creating a self-supporting closed environmental system. At 3.14 acres stocked with complex (and sensitive) vegetation, air and water supplies and support machinery weighing an untold amount of gigatons costing $200-300 million with relatively cheap Earth-based construction techniques and labor - not to mention Earth solar insulation for power and vegetation growth unlike what will
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What I don't understand is the people saying they shouldn't even try.
I won't go so far as to flat out say "They shouldn't try".
What I will say is that I can see some moral issues raised by this project.
They're sending human beings on a one-way trip to Mars. The one-way aspect is a big deal here. The plans for financing this are revenue generated from a reality TV show? How many TV shows remain popular for an entire human lifetime? Exactly none that I'm aware of. And what about any children born on Mars? Now they have to fund this for more than one human lifetime.
The wa
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This is also my objection to this whole enterprise.
If they manage to get perhaps 4-8 persons on Mars - when there is no more money in this who are going to pay for sending more food and oxygen to these persons? Or are they supposed to die there?
No, of course there will be a huge outcry and USA + EU + other western nations will be forced to pay for getting them home.
So thank you for wasting my taxes on a stunt..
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You misspelled "most".
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Yes, but it was all-new tech back then. It's not so much about science and research anymore, just about finance and engineering to pull this off.
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Er, no, long term sustainable off earth colonization is far from established technology. Landing on mars isn't even a very established technology.
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I guess Apollo managed to ramp up in 7 years
Yes, at a cost of $100 Billion dollars in today's money.
Let's be generous and say that a lot of the 'inventing' Mars One requires has already been done and slice that number by a third. That's still 33 billion dollars.
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Before that, Mars One will have established a habitable, sustainable outpost via multiple missions scheduled between 2018 and 2022."
Ah, no, I don't think so.
There isn't enough money for the research, let alone construction of such a sustainable outpost in that time frame. Getting it landed on Mars, assembled and tested is out of the question in that time frame.
We don't even know what "sustainable" means in the context of a planet where the atmosphere is 96% CO2 and atmospheric pressure is .0059 that of earth.
Just the energy needs alone would exhaust our already threatened supply of nuclear fuel. Sixteen kilograms, the amount of useabl
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I assume, like absolutely everything else humans have ever done before, it will go over budget.
So, if it goes over budget, you still think it's impossible?
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Virtually everything else humans have done has also gone beyond deadline.
So if you extend the budget to the equivalent of the Iraqi war effort combined with the Afghanistan war effort, and extend the time line another 50 years, then yes, anything is possible.
But by that time, and with that budget. return missions would also be possible, which removes the requirement for soliciting whack-jobs for a one way mission.
Why such an odd number? (Score:3)
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Presumably because this is only the second round. They had to eliminate 200,000 something crazies.
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Unmanned mission in 2018 (Score:4, Informative)
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They are not going to be sending people starting in 2018.
Or ever most likely. This whole thing just reeks of scam.
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They are not going to be sending people starting in 2018. The 2018 trip, if it actually happens, will be an unmanned demonstration flight.
I'm not sure how realistic the whole idea is but I'll wait to see if they actually do that unmanned trip before getting excited about Mars One.
They will disappear with the money long before then.
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Right (Score:2)
Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years
Kinda like "I will win the lottery".
How do these blatant PR articles get posted anyway. Lets stop giving any credence to this scam.
Scam (Score:2)
This is a scam. Seriously, I know we're all interested in visiting Mars but this whole thing just reeks of a scam. It's not technologically feasible and the costs would be astronomical if it were a real endeavor, particularly given the timelines. Only a motivated nation-state would have the resources to even hope to pull something like this off inside of the next 30 years. Someone is trying to scam a bunch of overly enthusiastic people out of a bunch of money.
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So the question is why send anyone off earth. It is risky, expensive, and provides no value. The answer is of course entertainment. A Space Shuttle used to cost around half a billion to launch. Harry Potter pro
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If???
It's all but a foregone certainty that some will die en-route... and I can't imagine those who survive the trip, if any, will live much beyond the first year.
Recall, for instance, just what the survivability rate was for people trying to get to the "new world" from Europe in the 1500's. And that was on a boat surrounded by a perfectly breathable atmosphere!
People are going to
Anyone else find this ironic? (Score:2)
This utter garbage makes it to the Slashdot front page while just below it is this headline: The Rise of Hoax News [slashdot.org].
Don't discount this so quickly (Score:5, Informative)
Lansdorp himself is a successful entrepreneur, here [ted.com] is a ted talk about his last company. He sold his stake and has been using the profit he made there to get Mars One off the ground for the past 3 years.
Among the people supporting them are:
- Gerard ‘t Hooft, Nobel Prize winning Theoretical Physicist
- Dr. Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society
- Terry Gamber, worked on the lander designs for the Viking mission
- A very large number of experienced people (see their website Advisers [mars-one.com], ambassadors [mars-one.com])
They don't plan to develop much of the technology themselves, they're planning to buy it from other companies mostly such as SpaceX. Most of this technology exists already. They have written statements of the companies that they are willing and able to supply these things.
List of the technology they want to use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One#Technology [wikipedia.org]
The total cost is estimated at $6 billion. Technology has come a long way, this combined with the privatization of space has caused costs to drop significantly. The falcon heavy for example costs only $77-135M to launch (2013).
They plan to get this through sponsorship deals. They're going to broadcast the entire thing on TV. Which makes sense, the olympics receives 6 billion dollars for 1 billion viewers. The moonlanding in 1969 had 500 million viewers. The population of the earth was only 3,5 billion back then and people weren't as well connected as they are now. So imagine how many viewers a colony on Mars would get?
No one says it's guaranteed that they will succeed, but i think they should try, and we should support it.
More information can be found on their website and IndieGoGo campaign:
http://www.mars-one.com/ [mars-one.com]
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mars-one-first-private-mars-mission-in-2018 [indiegogo.com]
The campaign is just to help pay for the Lockheed Martin study and to convince sponsors there is enough interest. I have donated myself, and advise people who think space exploration is important to do the same. It's risky, but it's high impact.
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List of the technology they want to use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One#Technology [wikipedia.org]
I am happy to see the emergence of some sort of sketch of the technical concept. And it the picture is not pretty.
MarsOne proposes that is going to land on Mars with an super-sized version of the Dragon [wikipedia.org] Earth-reentry vehicle. As a "proven technology" it is one proven to kill all the astronauts attempting to land on Mars as if it were a thick-atmosphere planet like Earth.
Landing on Mars in a human-sized vehicle (10,000 kg) is not possible with any known aero-breaking technology. Curiosity's (mass 900 kg) is
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Except for all the technologies which don't exist - which is pretty much of all of them except maybe the communications network. Otherwise, they're all (at best) bench prototypes with little if any field testing. But even if all the technologies existed, there still exists the huge task of integrating them into a workable spacecraft, de
MARS!!! (Score:2)
Are they selecting ISIS agents for breeding purposes?
And if they fail -- so what ? (Score:3)
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I'm all for starting manned missions again, but this reeks of a publicity stunt at best and a scam at worst. Even if they do launch people into space, will this actually result in any useful data or will it just air on TV as "Survivor in Space" (minus the surviving)? Just another brainless reality show and this time one where people volunteer to essentially be killed in as entertaining a manner possible.
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The issue is that failure taints the next expedition to another planet or moon that might succeed. No matter what they officially call it the new expedition will be called "Mars Two". With that failure record attached to the project good luck finding funding. Secondly all the wasted investment in a project that is in reality a scam could have gone to something actually useful.
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We'll learn that there are some things that are simply too expensive to fund by voluntary donations and advertising dollars.
Smoke and mirrors (Score:2)
Has anyone looked at the site?
Look at this page [mars-one.com]. Notice they lump Donations and Merchandise together but forget to subtract the costs related to the merchandise. Revenue [wikipedia.org] is not net revenue [wikipedia.org]. Note the expense graph does not even have a section for merchandise expenses and displays percentages and not dollar amounts. Why no dollar amounts? Maybe because they don't want us to know how much money they are hiding. Note they say "income from donations and merchandise have not been used to pay salaries" so what ar
1058 remaining applicants identified (Score:2)
So... out of 200,000 applicants, apparently 1058 were telephone sanitizers.
Ah, I see where you've gone wrong there (Score:2)
There are another two selection rounds to go before the lucky few get a one way trip to Mars. Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years to begin a human settlement partly funded by crowdsourcing and a reality TV show.
You say that like it's actually going to happen. It's not.
Re:reality show? (Score:4, Insightful)
Realty show has a bad connotation to it. It's more like a documentary program.
Anyway, I'll never understand why people are such naysayers about Mars One, especially on sites like Slashdot. At the very least, they are keeping extraterrestrial colonies in the public consciousness, something we should be celebrating. Even if this project ends up with some fatalities, name one human migration that didn't result in some deaths, or one exploration mankind has undertaken that wasn't risky. Early efforts of course are going to be dangerous, perhaps unwise, but if we were too scared to take risks we'd still all be living in African treetops.
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I agree completely. Slashdot is News for Nerds, but it seems the people posting here these days aren't nerds anymore.