Mars One - Get Your One Way Ticket To The Red Planet
Mars One - Get Your One Way Ticket To The Red Planet
A new private space firm from the Netherlands called Mars One is attempting to to send four astronauts on a one-way journey to Mars in 2023. The company intends to create a "habitable settlement" that will support settlers while they live and work on Mars. Every two years after 2023 an additional crew will arrive, enabling what they describe as a real living, growing community on Mars.
The pitch is simple, a Mars mission that will allow the participants to emigrate to the red planet, never to return. The trip will be be one way, allowing those who go to live and work on Mars for the rest of their lives. The company says a 'return ticket' is pretty much impossible when talking about the Red Planet.

It's certainly an ambitious idea fraught with dangers. The founders of Mars One are undaunted noting, "the elements needed for a viable living system are already present on Mars, so we can keep the number of launches down. For example, the location Mars One has chosen contains water ice in the ground which can be extracted through heat and used to drink, bathe with, or used to feed crops, but can also be manipulated to create oxygen. Mars even has natural sources of nitrogen, another element of the air we breathe. Certainly, we will always send up supplies like new computers or complex spare parts, but we will also provide the pioneers with machinery that will make them increasingly more independent from Earth. As soon as possible they should have a method to construct a larger habitat using local materials and a machine that can produce plastic components."
This may sound like rather crazy scheme, but the company has attracted some fairly influential supporters including a Nobel Prize winning Professor, Dr. Gerard 't Hooft who says, "Mars One is an extraordinarily daring initiative by people with vision and imagination. All confronted with it will, like I did, respond with skepticism: This will never work. NASA has had ideas like this on the books for decades, American President Bush wanted to launch a manned Mars mission too, and it never happened. Too costly, too complicated, and too chancy, even for NASA!"

In case you're not familiar with Prof. Dr. Gerard 't Hooft, (I admit I wasn't) here's a bit of background. 't Hooft is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. In 1999 't Hooft shared the Nobel prize in Physics with his thesis adviser Veltman for "elucidating the quantum structure of the electroweak interactions in physics"

Hooft goes on to describe why he thinks Mars One is a good idea, "This is when you ask me: aren’t you a scientist? What does science gain from this? Well, there are also scientific Mars missions. They cost a fraction of what this project will allocate. They are all robotic missions, but in the end science will be guaranteed to gain a great deal from human presence on various celestial bodies in our solar system. Universities don’t have the money for that. National governments have immediate priorities elsewhere. This project seems to me to be the only way to fulfill dreams of mankind’s expansion into space. It sounds like an amazingly fascinating experiment. Let’s get started!"
Crazy to some, inspiration to others. I suppose we'll see if Mars One gets off the ground when so many others have failed.
I've included the Mars One promotional video below.



 

