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The Strangeness of the Mars One Project
superboj sends an article written after its author investigated the Mars One Project for over a year. Even though 200,000 people have (supposedly) signed up as potential volunteers on a one-way trip to Mars, there are still frightfully few details about how the mission will be accomplished. From the article:
[Astronaut Chris Hadfield] says that Mars One fails at even the most basic starting point of any manned space mission: If there are no specifications for the craft that will carry the crew, if you don’t know the very dimensions of the capsule they will be traveling in, you can’t begin to select the people who will be living and working inside of it. "I really counsel every single one of the people who is interested in Mars One, whenever they ask me about it, to start asking the hard questions now. I want to see the technical specifications of the vehicle that is orbiting Earth. I want to know: How does a space suit on Mars work? Show me how it is pressurized, and how it is cooled. What’s the glove design? None of that stuff can be bought off the rack. It does not exist. You can’t just go to SpaceMart and buy those things."
The author concludes that the Mars One Project is "...at best, an amazingly hubristic fantasy: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media, in money, to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life’s work."
The minute they said there was an application fee it should have been obvious.
That, plus the tiny size of the team, the handwaving away of all technical problems to subcontractors, and the bizarre funding ideas, should have warned people off long ago. Sadly the regular newsmedia, in their admirable efforts to publish fun and interesting science storise, were duped.
It really is an example of the effects of authority and herd behavior. They first approached a number of prominent science/tech figures and asked them to endorse it. Turns out, if you approach a large enough number of people with a crazy idea, a few will by chance support it, especially if you keep the details hidden. Then this was enough for the avalanche of followers and news reports to start.
Do we have the technology to get to Mars? Depends on who you ask. NASA already has the plans on the drawing board. They just don't have the money. And that's the sticking point. There is absolutely no way you are going to get the $100 billion required for a Mars mission by producing a freaking reality show.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
They take $5-$75 (depending on how well-off your home country is), and they have tens of thousands of applications. You have to be a total moron to mistake that for anything other than a donation to the project. Phrasing it as an "application" makes it more personal and is a good marketing gimmick.
Exactly. I don't think that humans will go to Mars to remain there until robotic missions have essentially built and distilled and mined and refined enough to make the human settlement functional to the point that it runs without the human presence stressing the systems. It's going to be like remotely building a combination aircraft carrier and submarine on another planet with a communications loop of 20 minutes.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life's work
Personally, I think it's great that there are people dumb/crazy/brave enough to try to accomplish this outside of whatever the ossified system is. I'm sure Linus was told by plenty of people "You can't develop a better operating system like this! We've been sitting in cubicles at Bell Labs for 20 years, slaving over punch cards and 9 track mag tapes toiling in anonymity and you think a bunch of Internet hackers are going to create a viable operating system that can do real work?"
Maybe this is what bothers all those people, that despite their trying and relative anonymity someone else NOT diligently working in anonymity and utilizing other skills or methods will succeed where they haven't, and this bugs them. Should there be a manned mission to Mars it should be THEIR mission because of their ceaseless faith and devotion to the true methods and ideals of space travel.
It almost reads like a religous argument from the 16th century -- why should a group of barely literate peasants be allowed to read and interpret the word of God and achieve salvation through their own heretical ideals and methods? It can only be achieved through the devotion to and leadership of the one true church and its singular vision as revealed through its chosen leaders.
Now, I don't know much about Mars One and it probably is a bullshit deal designed to fleece the naive and they can't get to Disney's "Mission to Mars" let alone fly a mission to Mars. So what? Whining that it's hard and and that someone wants to do it some other way than the "true way" sounds like MORE bullshit designed to protect the chosen ones than any real criticism.
well they don't have the money to send a small gift box to mars so that's why they haven't had the money or thought it worth the effort to figure out the gritty details.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
200 000 total morons then.
they should have just have asked for donations, would be ethically easier to defend.
and that really explains how why they were asking for applicants when they really were asking for donors, to get money. money from morons.
that really explains all the strangeness of the project: first they needed some cash and this provided them with some cash. not with enough cash to do anything related to the actual stated goal of course but plenty of money to pay for living expenses for couple of people for few years. as a project like that, there's nothing strange about it.
oh and had they any real plan then they could have found few rich donors to pay the same money. but since they don't have, this is the way they had to go - since rich bigtime donors tend to ask things like "how?".
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
even there, they need to become much more efficient.
more efficient ... than who? who else has autonomously landed a nuclear powered rover the size of a small car on the surface of mars? do you have some evidence to support that this should / could have been done for less (2.5B USD)?
i searched for "curiosity rover pork" and the first article that came up was from the tea party. there you go.
There should be at least three well-tested working backups for everything thats needed: water, food, housing, etc...
I would start by creating self contained units that can survive equally well in the sahara, antartica, and underwater with minimal* air exchange with
the outside. Salt water, cold, and sand are notoriously hard on equipment and if a single type of unit can survive in all 3 environments then they
might have a fighting chance. My guess is we have very little that can survive 80 years in any of those 3 environments without repair materials
being sent and I don't see mars being self sufficient for a very long time.
* the only reason I say minimal is that there is no reason even on mars that you couldn't do outgassing or ingassing of needed or unneeded
gases. It doesn't have to be 100% self contained if there is some way to regulate correctly the amount of different gases in the environment.
Its far more likely that we will send people that die early.
Yep. Being a pioneer is all about finding new and interesting ways to die ... or the old ways in new settings.
See for example the first few hundred years (counting from the Vikings) of European colonization attempts of North America. (Probably the same holds true of Asian attempts, but they're a lot further back in the prehistorical record.)
Or more recently, the roughly 10% that died along the Oregon Trail.
As a plaque on some old Conestoga wagon puts it: "The cowards never started. The weak died along the way. Only the strong survived."
That said, only the stupid set out on a trek like that without preparation, and they don't even last as long as the weak. If Mars One has being doing preparation, they haven't been talking about it.
-- Alastair
Earth's crust is 5% iron. That's pure enough to make it cheaper than mining an asteroid. And unless you come up with amazing breakthroughs in technology, even mining gold on Earth is cheaper than an on asteroid.
The leverage with which powerful people can control others on Mars would be undeniably much greater than on Earth. On Earth, you can flee on foot. You can hide in the amazon and become a hunter-gathered if you want. On Mars, if you're at odds with your colony leadership, you have to acquire spacesuits air food water building materials etc. Everyone will know where you are on a Mars base, and all they have to do to eliminate dissent is "accidentally" depressurize the compartment. Mars requires living together and depending on each other a great deal, and that lends itself to strong rules and strong leadership.
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