There’s an old joke about sending someone you hate on a one-way trip to Mars. Now, a Dutch entrepreneur has formed a company around this concept — and it’s no joke.
Bas Lansdorp, the 35-year-old founder of Mars One, told FoxNews.com his company is serious about a one-way mission. The company will hold a worldwide lottery next year to select 40 people for a training team. They will then set up a mock colony in the desert, possibly somewhere in the U.S., for three months. This initial team will be reduced to ten crew members.
“We will send humans to Mars in 2023,” he told FoxNews.com. “They will live there the rest of their lives. There will be a habitat waiting for them, and we’ll start sending four people every two years.”
Mars One plans [one-way] mission to Red Planet for 2023
To Boldly Go: What Made 400 People Volunteer for a One-Way Mission to Mars?
An interplanetary trip to Mars could take as little as 10 months, but returning would be virtually impossible — making the voyage a form of self-imposed exile from Earth unlike anything else in human history.
What would inspire someone to volunteer? We’ve just found out.
A special edition of the Journal of Cosmology details exactly how a privately-funded, one-way mission to Mars could depart as soon as 20 years from now — and it prompted more than 400 readers to volunteer as colonists.
“I’ve had a deep desire to explore the universe ever since I was a child and understood what a rocket was,” Peter Greaves told FoxNews.com. Greaves is the father of three, and a jack-of-all-trades who started his own motorcycle dispatch company and fixes computers and engines on the side.
“I envision life on Mars to be stunning, frightening, lonely, quite cramped and busy,” he told FoxNews.com. “Unlike Earth I wouldn’t be able to sit by a stream or take in the view of nature’s wonder, or hug a friend, or breath deeply the sweet smell of fresh air — but my experience would be so different from all 6 to 7 billion human beings … that in itself would make up for the things I left behind.”
Mars, Here We Come! Congress Approves $19 Billion NASA Budget
Congress passed a vital NASA authorization bill late Wednesday, paving the way for an extra space shuttle flight next year and a new human spaceflight plan that takes aim at missions to an asteroid — and ultimately even to Mars.
The NASA authorization bill approved by the House includes a $19 billion budget in 2011 for the U.S. space agency, and a total of $58 billion through 2013. It paves the way for several NASA projects, among them a new heavy-lift rocket for deep space missions and funding to aid the development of commercial space vehicles for eventual NASA use.
NASA Scrambles for Alternate Mars Landing Site
Scientists are scrambling to find an alternative landing site for a long-armed robot set to launch this summer on a mission to dig into Mars’ icy north pole to search for signs of primitive life.
The original landing spot was nixed after images beamed back by the eagle-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter unexpectedly showed scores of bus-sized boulders littered over old crater rims on flat plains.
The gigantic rocks pose a danger to NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander, which unlike the rolling twin rovers, will be stationary, mission principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona said during a news teleconference Thursday.