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."
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:3, Interesting)
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 announced the date for orbital flights.
None of the world's space agencies have figured out how to land people on Mars.
...yet these jokers have it all worked out? I don't think so.
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]
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.