Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mars One Does Not Renew Contracts For Robotic Missions

Posted by timothy on from the first-one-was-good-enough dept.

braindrainbahrain writes Mars One is, of course, the highly speculative, low credibility project to land humans on Mars after a one-way trip. In 2013 they had announced that two contracts had been awarded to the aerospace industry to develop a Mars orbiter and a Mars lander to carry a science experiment payload to the surface. Both contracts have been completed, but so far, Mars One has no immediate plans to renew the contracts and pursue further development of the crafts.

11 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. This Just In! by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This just in - Getting humans safely to the surface of Mars is way wicked hard and totally expensive.

    1. Re:This Just In! by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And a bad reality TV show is much cheaper, safer and offers at least theoretical returns on investments. Bad reality TV shows don't need rocket scientists either.

      3. Profit !

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    2. Re:This Just In! by sg_oneill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yep.The funny thing about reality TV shows is they don't really rate that well in the scheme of things. They don't rate poorly either, but not great. But they are *dirt cheap* to make, so TV companies just bulk order them because its low investment for medium returns. Star trek shows consistently topped ratings charts, but they where ridiculously expensive to make. So they stopped making them. "Duck tamers vs Nazi skinheads season 19" on the other hand won't get barely half that rating, but because it costs next to nothing, its the safer bet.

      The end result however is that TV is dying. People are increasingly just reading the net, and at most maybe keeping up with a few well made cable series. The short term pursuit of profits have killed TV in the long term.

      And this is the environment Mars One wants to base the future of space travel. I don't think so somehow.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
  2. News Media by jklovanc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When will the news media wake up to the fact that this is a scam and stop giving Mars Zero (zero because they have zero chance of actually going to Mars) free advertising?

    1. Re:News Media by Beck_Neard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So far there's no evidence that it's an outright fraud; it's just REALLY wishful thinking. But that's almost equally bad, because when it inevitably fails it's going to hurt the space community because they will be permanently associated with failures and scams. This is why I think the onus is on the space community (The Planetary Society, the Mars Society, etc.) to quickly refute and bury Mars One as fast as possible.

      --
      A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
    2. Re:News Media by itzly · · Score: 3, Informative

      Mars has significantly stronger gravity than the moon, so the little rocket engine that they used on the moon lander wouldn't be able to reduce much of the orbital speed until it slammed in the surface. Also, the moon lander was operating in a vacuum. Designing a rocket engine that works against supersonic atmospheric flow is an entirely different matter.

      And while parachutes are an existing technology, a parachute big enough to help with a Mars landing is not. You can't just scale up existing technology that's already at the edge of what we can do.

  3. Mars one has now by invictusvoyd · · Score: 5, Funny

    abandoned it's plans to build a vehicle and are now building a giant horeshoe magnet to pull the planet closer to earth so that they can board it with wooden planks ..

  4. What will really happen by 7bit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If the funders are really serious about creating a Reality TV experience about volunteers taking a one way trip to Mars then this is the only way they can do it at this time:

    1. They will publicly do exactly what they have been doing so far, all the while screening the applicants for those most likely to buy in to what they are being told.

    2. Once they have the final applicants sequestered and completely removed from the public and communication with the outside world they may or may not give hints to the public about what is really going to happen:

    What will really happen:

    The "Winners" will be totally isolated from communication with the public with the exception of very carefully screened media and family communications etc.

    They will be constantly filmed documentary style, which they already expect.

    After the Training "Season" and drama they will be boarded onto what is described to them as a top secret craft built by the Russians or whoever and carefully told that space travel technology is actually far advanced of what the public has been told and that they will be Pioneers in space exploration.

    They will actually be entering an expensive yet economically viable simulated ship (ala Ascension http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... where they will then spend a number of months "traveling" to Mars with cameras in every room.

    After that season they will have a dramatic yet fright-filled arrival and landing at Mars. I assume at this point that they will pull a Capricorn One in some desert. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... ).

    At some point, as each person dies for some reason, the truth will be revealed to each one and we will have the Drama of them having their 'Second Chance' at life.

    -- If done successfully and done right I would actually watch this drama. So everyone, please, shush! Don't tell those final 100 anything!

    1. Re:What will really happen by Kjella · · Score: 3, Funny

      If the funders are really serious about creating a Reality TV experience about volunteers taking a one way trip to Mars then this is the only way they can do it at this time: (...) At some point, as each person dies for some reason, the truth will be revealed to each one and we will have the Drama of them having their 'Second Chance' at life.

      So what you're saying is ditch the space tech, invent resurrection tech? Because if you die on reality TV you're dead. Or have you got it confused with fake scripted "reality" shows played by actors pretending to be ordinary people?

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  5. time to learn from history by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

    The Darien Scheme was an unsuccessful attempt by the Kingdom of Scotland to become a world trading nation by establishing a colony called "Caledonia" on the Isthmus of Panama on the Gulf of Darién in the late 1690s. The aim was for the colony to have an overland route that connected the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. From the beginning the undertaking was beset by poor planning and provisioning, divided leadership, lack of demand for trade goods, devastating epidemics of disease, and failure to anticipate the Spanish Empire's military response. It was finally abandoned in March 1700 after a siege by Spanish forces, which also blockaded the harbour.[1]

    As the Darien company was backed by 25–50% of all the money circulating in Scotland; its failure left the entire Lowlands almost completely ruined, and was an important factor in weakening their resistance to the Act of Union (completed in 1707). The land where the Darien colony was built is virtually uninhabited today.

    history lesson:

    some time in the next few centuries, there will be an interplanetary exploration/ colonization pyramid scheme that will bankrupt millions of people, maybe even a nation or two

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  6. Plenty of circumstancial evidence of fraud by geekpowa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Firstly, their claim on their website "While complex, the Mars One Mission is feasible. The science and technology required to place humans on Mars exists today. ", is provably false and it is reasonable to expect authors of this statement know this to be false. First thing that always comes to my mind is delivery configuration for soft land something closely resembling required tonnage on the surface, including the 4 meat bags they claim they are able to send. Simply put, no viable configuration currently exists. When you look at tonnage Apollo landed on the moon, vs what government space agencies have successfully landed on Mars so far, vs what NASA is currently developing, there is an enormously absurd leap of faith to say landing ppl on Mars is feasible with today's tech.

    Secondly, a document like this : http://www.mars-one.com/images..., just stinks of handwaving with overuse of technical flourishes, fails to deal with funadmental issues, i.e. the weight issue, and seems to be created with an intent to deceive and create false assurance that mission profile is both well defined and accessible.

    Accepting that proof of fraud is far from conclusive, the whole thing just reeks to high heaven of fraud.