Mars One Delayed 2 Years, CEO Releases Video In Response To Criticism

CryoKeen writes It's interesting how different news sites spin #marsgate. From Yahoo News: "The private colonization project Mars One has pushed its planned launch of the first humans toward the Red Planet back by two years, to 2026. The delay was necessitated by a lack of investment funding, which has slowed work on a robotic precursor mission that Mars One had wanted to send toward the Red Planet in 2018, Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp said in a new video posted today... 'We had a very successful investment round in 2013 that has financed all the things that we have done up to now. And we have actually come to an agreement with a consortium of investors late last year for a much bigger round of investments. Unfortunately, the paperwork of that deal is taking much longer than we expected,' Lansdorp said in the video." This Astrowatch article is a lot more scathing and to the point: "Mars One, the Dutch company planning to send people on a one-way trip to Mars, that recently selected a group of 100 hopefuls, struggles with criticism. In a Medium story this week, Mars One finalist Joseph Roche presented multiple reasons as to why he believed the entire operation is a complete scam. In response, the company published a video Thursday in which Bas Lansdorp, CEO and Co-founder of Mars One, replies to recent criticism concerning the feasibility of Mars One's human trip to Mars. He also revealed that the mission will be delayed for two years. Roche said that the 'only way' to get selected for the next round of the Mars One candidacy process was to donate money. 'My nightmare about it is that people continue to support it and give it money and attention, and it then gets to the point where it inevitably falls on its face,' Roche told Elmo Keep for Medium."

Comments

Similar to pay-upfront job scams

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have to pay a fee to get the job -- it's a scam. Except in this case, they're not even bothering to guarantee you the job. Because it's so exciting, they need only promise you the opportunity. And then further down the road, they'll likely ask for more money, "to get further up the ladder, still".

http://www.scamwatch.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/694333

Re:Similar to pay-upfront job scams

[rudy_wayne]

If you have to pay a fee to get the job -- it's a scam. Except in this case, they're not even bothering to guarantee you the job. Because it's so exciting, they need only promise you the opportunity. And then further down the road, they'll likely ask for more money, "to get further up the ladder, still".

http://www.scamwatch.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/694333

Maybe Mars One should partner with Amway.

delay

[itzly]

In other words: the scam is working nicely, and we'd like to milk this cow for another 2 years.

Re:delay

[crashumbc]

Exactly, the whole fact that they are doing the "selection" process first is classic scam.

Why the fuck do you need select people BEFORE you've even proven you can put robots on the planet.

Re:delay

[burtosis]

Well I can think of three reasons.
1) you want to popularize reality snuff tv shows
2)You want to embezzle the funds and flee to a country with no extradition laws
3)You want to blow investor money on pseudo legal expenses like corporate bentleys and 'business trips' where the per diem includes hooker and blow expenses.

Re:delay

[itzly]

Reusable boosters are nice, but they don't even have a realistic plan for the landing stage, which is much harder. The Curiosity rover used a complex landing procedure using the 'sky crane' concept, and that thing was only 1 ton. To keep a few humans alive for a while, you'll need a much more massive lander, and you need to set it down very gently.

Re:delay

[taiwanjohn]

Remember Viking I and II? They didn't need complicated airbags/sky-cranes and such because they used a "brute-force" powered landing just like Apollo. But SpaceX now claims to have a Super-Draco thruster that can ignite under supersonic conditions... IOW, SpaceX claims it's Dragon.V2 capsule can land propulsively on "any surface" in the solar system, including (especially) Mars. Based on recent performance in the last few years, how much money would you be willing to bet that Elon Musk is wrong about this?

This is where the reusable booster comes in handy... if your limiting factor is fuel, then just use multiple cheap launches to assemble the hardware and fuel on orbit before trans-mars injection.

Re:delay

[DanielRavenNest]

Elon Musk wants to build a Mars Colony too, but he has a rocket factory (SpaceX), and several other businesses that can earn lots of money *and* supply hardware for Mars: Tesla (electric cars on Earth, electric rovers on Mars), Solar City (home roofs, and soon high efficiency cells for Earth and Mars), and the Gigafactory (batteries for vehicles *and* nighttime backup for solar panels). So his plan is a lot more feasbile than Mars One's.

The real question is where is Mars One going to get the $6 billion they estimate for their project? If they have that money, they can hire the right aerospace companies and engineers to build real hardware. But without it, they just have pretty pictures on a website, and aren't going anywhere.

And as someone who helped build the Space Station, and written a book on Space Systems Engineering ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ), Mars One isn't being innovative *enough* to really bring down costs.

Re:delay

[taiwanjohn]

Obviously they didn't have SpaceX's capabilities available when they approved the Curiosity mission over a decade ago.

Having a rocket thruster that can ignite in supersonic mode is a game-changer, especially for Mars. Most people in "the business" didn't think it was possible until SpaceX proved them wrong. This is just another example of folks not realizing how much the game has changed while they weren't paying attention.

We are on the brink of massive changes in aerospace... I just hope enough people will "tune in" before it's too late.

Re:delay

[jandrese]

It's a classic advance fee scam. You promise the suckers something awesome if they'll just front a bit of cash to handle processing fees and transportation fees and whatever other fees the scammers can think of. It works because after the people invest money they don't want to lose their investment and are more willing to handle further fees. In some cases they are trapped because they took out a loan with the promise of the future payout as collateral and they can't afford to pay the loan back unless the deal goes through.

next you will be an Independent contractor and hav

[Joe_Dragon]

next you will be an Independent contractor and have to pay for all your tools and other stuff needed to do the job. And once on mars you can't go to court.

Lack of funding

[wiredlogic]

The delay was necessitated by a lack of investment funding

Maybe because they don't have a rocket, a ship, a way to land, a way to ferry supplies, a way to fund those supplies, or a way to live on another planet long term. Only a fool would dump money on this adventure.

Re:Lack of funding

[burtosis]

Only a fool would dump money on this adventure.

ahh so its a perfectly viable business plan with a wide consumer base. I was worried there for a minute.

Re:Lack of funding

[gl4ss]

come on, they only need couple of months for the paperwork to go through and then the nigerian space program will transfer the funds.

Who'd a thunk

[burtosis]

The potential for scamming is out of this world!

although it would make for a great survivor sequel, albeit a single episode.

Costs?

[joe_frisch]

Mars one claims $6B to put 4 people on mars.
On one side -how do they plan to raise that amount of money? They use the Olympics as an example,but that is an event with an enormous viewership. Are they claiming they can get anything like a similar number of viewers for a bunch of guys living (or slowly dying) on mars?

On the other side, what technology do they have that makes a mars mission cost $6B, not the hundreds of billions that NASA estimates? Sure they may be able to do for somewhat less money, but a factor of 100??? Where is their demonstration of technical expertise to support such a claim?

Its just a scam.

Re:Costs?

[itzly]

On one side -how do they plan to raise that amount of money?

After the selection process, the candidates will enter a "rocket" that's really a cardboard prop with hidden cameras. During the journey, they'll face some challenges that will force them vote for the next candidate to be pushed out of the airlock.

Re:Costs?

[Rei]

You know, this gets me thinking... what's really the minimum necessary for a person to stand a chance of making it to the surface of Mars alive? Let's say:

1) 150 days transit
2) Passenger remains drugged out of their gourd during the whole voyage so that they don't go crazy in the ridiculously small amount of space they're allocated, nor burn more than a minimal amount of consumables.
3) No extra radiation shielding; craft keeps its thickest end toward the sun and puts its consumables around the passenger but otherwise does nothing special
4) Landing hardware done as an exact duplicate of MSL, no re-engineering. MSL used a 4 tonne spacecraft to deliver a 900kg payload to the surface. An incredibly cramped capsule may fit that payload profile.
5) No attempt to get back or even survive for any significant length of time. Passenger has to be someone who wants to die on Mars.

Normal O2 consumption is 0,9kg/day; let's say 0,7 due to #2. Consumption of pure fat for say 1500 calories per day is 166g; let's say 300. I don't have numbers on CO2 scrubbers, let's put it at the same as O2. Let's say 3 liters (3kg) water consumption per day, 2kg recovered from the air via a chiller, 1kg lost to excretion, so 1kg total per day. Let's say 1kg other consumables per day. No complex recycling systems or anything that could seriously inflate your costs. We're at the ballpark of 3.7kg per day, so 555kg for the journey there, which doesn't need to be landed. Give them 600kg for some margin and a little time alive. These figures probably wouldn't size your spacecraft out of an affordable launch vehicles.

So yeah, if you really wanted to, I bet you could have a moderate chance of delivering a suicidal human alive but very ill to the surface of Mars to live for a short period of time for only a couple billion dollars in development + launch costs.

Who wants to sign up? ;)

Re:next you will be an Independent contractor and

[tomhath]

And once on mars you can't go to court.

That would be Martian H1-B status, since you are an alien there.

Re:Worse than Biosphere2

[Rei]

Biosphere 2 was pretty flawed but it actually did something. Even had some educational value.

This is just a scam. I think the only unknown is whether the founders believe it to be a scam or whether they're truly convinced by their own BS.

Re:Viking vs Curiosity

[DanielRavenNest]

Several reasons:

* Curiosity has almost twice the landed weight of the Viking Landers
* Rocket thrusters firing at ground level would contaminate the soil, which they wanted to analyze
* Curiosity is a rover. You either are carrying dead weight from the propulsion system, or need a roll-off ramp
* Curiosity's wheels and suspension allowed landing on rougher ground by landing on them directly. Rocket thrusters might have damaged the wheels by throwing rocks around

Re:There is no evidence Mars One is not sincere

[BarbaraHudson]

And then there's this further down the page:

The most recent semi-final Mars100 selection occurred after being given multiple sources of technical and press release information about the mission and being told to memorize the knowledge elements for a personal 15 minute interview with Dr. Norbert Kraft, MD, JAXA initial candidate and NASA long-duration group selection expert. Once Dr. Kraft had interviewed all 663 candidates on technical knowledge retention and public speaking ability

So, they're selecting 100 people for a one-way journey to Mars based on being able to memorize and spit back press releases and a few facts that go along with them, and look good doing it.

Sounds more like the interview process for a Fox News reporter.