Surprise! The Mars One mission is a fantasy

[BigJake]

This article from Medium provides in-depth coverage of the various reasons why. It goes into all the scientific details of the problems any manned Mars mission would have to face, the psychology of signing up for interplanetary journey to essentially spend the rest of your life on death row, the flimsy and slapdash nature of, and false claims associated with, the Mars One company itself.

But what makes it a particularly good article is that it grounds its narrative in the story of one of the applicants for Mars One, an Australian guy named Josh:

When Josh was 10 years old, he sat cross-legged on the floor in his parent’s neat, suburban home in Australia, enraptured. It was May 1996 and Andy Thomas had just stepped out of the space shuttle Endeavour and onto the tarmac of Runway 33 of the Kennedy Space Center. In his flight suit, bright orange against the blue of the sky, he talked in his clipped and measured British-sounding tones about seeing his hometown of Adelaide from the God-like vantage of space. These TV images would stick in Josh’s mind like gum to a boot sole.

Andy Thomas was just like Josh, Josh reckoned. He was an Australian. An Australian who’d made it all the way to NASA. Who’d been to space and back. And everyone in the world, it seemed, wanted to talk to him about it. If Andy Thomas had done it, then Josh could do it, too. That could be Josh someday, speaking before the world’s media, beaming out of everyone’s television, one of just over 500 people to ever leave the orbit of this planet. In that moment Josh wanted only one thing out of life: to be an astronaut.

Josh is now 29. He has been a member of the Royal Marine Commandos. An engineer. A physicist. A blast specialist, a mining technician, and, briefly, a scuba instructor. He’s worked for one of the most famous artists alive. He was also a stand-up comedian—he plays Keith the Anger Management Koala, a foul-mouthed, sociopathic character in a furry suit, who provides Josh a remove from himself to exorcise a few of the demons he’s been carrying around. It’s a pretty weird show.

One day in 2012, Josh was sitting in an Edinburgh Starbucks, feeling down, when he came across a call for volunteers for a fledgling space program; the application process would be open soon. There was just one catch. The mission was one way.

To Mars.

This was his shot. This was big. This was it. All these years, fostering that childhood dream. Finally, his life was going to change forever.

When the time came, Josh filled out the form. Could he describe a time when he had been scared? A different time when he had been stressed? Why was it important that the mission be one way?

He paid the registration fee, uploaded a video explaining why he should be chosen for the mission, and hit send.

Then he waited.

Worth reading the whole thing.

 

[ALF]

Isn't our whole life "on death row" anyway?
We're waiting to die whatever planet we are on.

 

[BigJake]

Isn't our whole life "on death row" anyway?

Don't know about you, but I don't live in a tiny bunker with no prospect of ever seeing anything else again. "Death row" is imprisonment, not just mortality.

 

[arch101]

I didn't think any government on Earth would REALLY let anyone go up there to die anyway.

 

[sojourner]

Mars One was never going to raise the money to get there in the first place, regardless of whether any country could tell them they could go or not.

 

[Deckerd]

Anyone sensible knew it was a scam.

Astrophysicist who applied out of curiosity.

 

[MacLeod]

Are we really suprised? Any manned mission to Mars let alone pernament would cost tens of billions if not hundreds of billions.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Some good links if you'd like to do some more reading on space exploration, and why settling an offworld colony, even to a place as relatively close as Mars, is extremely difficult and expensive, if not downright impossible with our current capabilities:

Why is it so hard to travel to Mars?

How many people would it take to build a self-sufficient offworld colony of our current technological level? (In case you're wondering the quick answer: ~100 million.)

Why is space colonization so fascinating to a certain subset of people?

This piece on the space shuttle is also pure gold. It encapsulates quite well why manned space travel is so difficult, not merely because of technology, but also politics and bureaucracy.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

The inevitable failure aside, I don't think that the original plan was a suicide, life on death row or even a one-way trip. Not because it was never going to fly, but there is still a connection.

The entire thing was so extremely optimistic, that if it were to ever succeed, options have immediately surfaced to take care of the astronauts, to turn them into genuine colonists, to send them company and ultimately to plan them a return trip home. At worst, if they are on Mars with extremely bad prospects for the future, that would alone invite enough interest and sympathy to find the money to take them back. But that's the worst option.

Right now, SpaceX have a much more realistic plan – it involves development of spacecraft that far surpasses the capabilities available now (any plans with what we have are far-fetched, at best). And I don't think that would be enough without breakthroughs in extraterrestrial mining robotics, and a solid plan for local resource utilisation on Mars. Or something. But if the immensely more crazy Mars One succeeded, so would SpaceX a few years later. The latter at least knows what they are doing – as much as it is possible when it comes to space. And if SpaceX flies too, there's nothing to stop them from landing at the same spot or even offering return flight seats for the people already there.

So the banishment/death penalty side of it was a bit overblown. And, I mean, it's not a suicide mission if it is next to impossible to ever embark on it.