Is a One-Way Trip to #Mars Crazy? :( Is it #SciFi? :)

Ancient Beauty of Sight – #poetry by ... Practice for #Mars – Eat Like a Marti...

Is a One-Way Trip to #Mars Crazy? :( Is it #SciFi? :)

NASA concept Photo ID: S93-45586

Mars-One is a Dutch not-for-profit planning to establish a permanent colony on Mars. They’ve selected candidates to train for the one-way trip in five or ten years. Is that insane?

Problems to overcome

They say their settlers will land a ship using retro rockets in a configuration never tried before, and no one’s ever landed such big payloads.
Science won’t be their focus, colonization will – but how do you learn to live off the Martian land without a lot of specialized science?
Going to Mars, even one-way, will cost a lot – really, really a lot. Mars-One will raise the billions needed using the Olympics as a model – ad revenue, broadcast rights, and donations.
MIT students studied colony plans and found even simple things like CO2 versus O2 balance for the plants and humans don’t compute. That Mars-One hasn’t planned enough time or money to develop their missions. And they doubt a colony could become self-sustaining anytime soon.

In my scifi book, Glory on Mars, the first colony is further in the future than Mars-One, and I give my settlers some neat technologies – robots to build the settlement, an Artificial Intelligence, and satellite systems complete with an orbiting energy station to beam power to the surface. That’s still not enough to prevent disasters.

View the physicsfocus article and Mars-One web site. More about the MIT study here including a video of their debate with Mars-One founders. More about my books here.