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."

Comments

It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

At the risk of sounding pretentious,

[Beck_Neard]

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.

Re: Cart not just before the horse

[TWX]

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.