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Mars One is Dead (engadget.com)
The company that aimed to put humanity on the red planet has met an unfortunate, but wholly-expected end. Engadget reports: Mars One Ventures, the for-profit arm of the Mars One mission was declared bankrupt back in January, but wasn't reported until a keen-eyed Redditor found the listing. It was the brainchild of Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, previously the founder of green energy company Ampyx Power. Lansdorp's aim was to start a company that could colonize one of our nearest neighbors. Mars One was split into two ventures, the non-profit Mars One Foundation and the for-profit Mars One Ventures. The Swiss-based Ventures AG was declared bankrupt by a Basel court on January 15th and was, at the time, valued at almost $100 million. Mars One Ventures PLC, the UK-registered branch, is listed as a dormant company with less than $25,000 in its accounts. There is no data available on the non-profit Mars One Foundation, which funded itself by charging its commercial partner licensing fees. Speaking to Engadget, Bas Lansdorp said that the Foundation is still operating, but won't be able to act without further investment. Lansdorp declined to give further comment beyond saying that he was working with other parties "to find a solution."
Their invent-new-month-names department blew up their budget.
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This is a good thing. We need to stop obsessing about Mars. Once humanity moves off-earth, the dumbest thing we could do is settle onto another planetary surface. We would just be moving from one gravity well to another. The asteroids should be our colonial target.
The numbers don't close for funding space like a reality TV show.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
This really was a waste of time. SpaceX will be going to Mars starting in 2022. That is only 3 years for now. I am sure Mars One saw that and gave up.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Mystery Red of the Great American Eclipse
It has blood on it!
ABCNews: Eclipse makes pendulum wander
Sound of Silence
"The Swiss-based Ventures AG was declared bankrupt by a Basel court on January 15th and was, at the time, valued at almost $100 million"
Talk about non-sequiturs !?!
Did the author and/or a Slashdot "Editor" REALLY not think this sentence was worth explaining or correcting ?!
How much money did it move from the orbit of investors to the orbit of the recipients?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
This is precisely how people make money disappear - through "licensing fees" charged by a nonprofit arm of the corporation, which is not accountable to any investors. The money moves from the corporation to the nonprofit, where it cannot be touched by investors, banks, or other creditors in a bankruptcy.
From there, the money is paid in the form of exorbitantly high salaries to its executive staff, often where no work is actually being performed.
Seriously, anybody that thought that this had a chance does not understand what is involved in space travel.
Right now, only 2 private ventures, Spacex and Blue Origin, are doing what is needed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Bankruptcy doesn't mean you have no worth. It means you can't pay your debts. Companies go bankrupt all the time and still have assets that have worth.
Mars is waste of time and resources at the moment.
The current goal should be permnanet base on the Moon.
1. development of technology of fully automated tunnel boring
2. development of technology for permanent life support: water, oxygen etc.
3. development of technology for liftoff from Moon using local resources as fuel
by the ingravs that the species must colonize mars or risk being wiped out by the dinosaur-killer asteroid
i was also assured that all technology always gets better all the time and that 3d printing and private space companies will make space colonies a sure thing
have the ingravs lied to me
The reason is that if you set up a station on mars, you have to assume that you can have as much as 3-6 months outage due to dust storms.
As such, Amundsen–Scott offers the REAL extreme needed for testing (other than maybe putting a station on top of Everest or K2). Need real external power, so a SMALL 1MW nuclear power station really needs to be developed. In fact, that would be ideal for south pole so as to quit bringing diesel fuel for electricity.
Likewise, the ppl would have to explore in space suits and gear in 0-40 C. This would give a decent testing of the equipment.
Of course, doing similar in high planes desert would be smart as well, but that will only test a worn out dust.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In what way were they valued at 100 mil? All they had to their name was couple of bad CGI pictures.
Much Dogecoin! Such Mars!
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I can't live on the moon, you insensitive clod! I'm allergic to dairy!
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So you are making the argument that this use of "was valued at" did not include the company's debts.
I am making the argument that that is something that a normal EDITOR would think worth pointing out.
Take slashdot (or hackernews, or various subreddits) for example, entire communities of self-styled technology enthusiasts who went to university, maybe got a CS degree, then they get a job writing HTML and javascript, maybe install Linux on their PC's. Despite having meager tech skills, they consider themselves "experts", and they go online and start talking to others with similar levels of "skill", and eventually you get this concentrated collection of guys who's lack of actual real world knowledge is only matched by their over confidence. Eventually that overconfidence combined with general ignorance overwhelms their ability to reason and think critically about new ideas, and that makes them the perfect marks. They have an unwillingness to admit doubt and at the same time they protect themselves by moderating away dissenting comments so forums like this become feedback loops of bad ideas getting good coverage and voila: more suckers are born. Of course this isn't unique to tech, it just seems to have found a natural home in it.
funded itself by charging its commercial partner licensing fees
So the founder is going to jail, right? Because if that's not obviously a scam, then nothing is.
Temperature concerns on mars are not as bad as Antartica. The diffuse atmosphere results in less thermal loss on the red planet.
The best Space Nutters always talk about building floating cities on Venus.
Yeah we know you like to troll about space topics and you're seriously a dick about it. Your "space nutters" meme is quite tired. You aren't convincing anyone of anything. If you don't like talking about concepts in space exploration that's fine but other people do. Let it go. People are just talking about the idea. Nobody has seriously proposed actually doing a floating city because everyone knows we don't have that sort of technology and won't for a very long time if ever. Certainly not in either of our remaining lifespans. If people want to talk about something that won't happen for hundreds or thousands of years if ever, why do you give a shit? It's fun to discuss. If you don't care about the topic then go somewhere else and talk about something you actually care about.
I'll tell you what: you show you can build a floating city here on Earth first. Then we will talk about doing it in Venus which is about 1,000,000x harder than on Earth.
Sigh... The atmosphere on Venus is FAR more dense and massive than the one on Earth. Presuming a floating city is possible at all, it would be FAR easier to float one in the atmosphere of Venus than Earth. If we get to the point where we have the sort of technology to make a floating city and to navigate around the solar system economically, doing so on Venus is very plausibly easier than on Earth.
Yes, that valuation did not include debts. Duh.
No, your not. The wiki page was just a start. There is volumes of ideal out there with workable plans. You're ether uneducated on the subject or just a trolling now.
Yes he is trolling. Or he's a dick about the topic to such a degree that it is indistinguishable from trolling. Either way don't waste your time.
There are no floating cities on Earth, which is far easier to accomplish. Why do you think Venus would be different?
You do realize that Venus is a different planet with very different properties, right? The important one is that the atmosphere of Venus is FAR more massive and dense than Earth's atmosphere. If a floating city is possible then doing it on Venus would likely be far easier on Earth for the exact same reason we can more easily float boats on water than in the air.
No it's not a serious proposal. It's just a conceptual idea. Maybe in a few hundred or thousands of years we might seriously entertain the idea but for our lifetime it's almost certain to remain just a fun hypothetical discussion. Don't get so worked up about it.
The best Space Nutters always talk about building floating cities on Venus. I'll tell you what: you show you can build a floating city here on Earth first.
Plans are in fact already under way> .
The build is somewhat comparable since the atmosphere of Venus is so much more dense, building on the water is a lot closer to building in the Earth's much less dense atmosphere... and you even have the benefit of salt water bing highly corrosive to test out what you are building, though Venus is probably a whole other level of challenge there.
I personally think building on Mars is still a better choice than Venus, though it would be nice to see people start to think through options there more realistically.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Mars wont work for one fundamental reason; it can never be terraformed because it isn't big enough, even if we gave it an atmosphere it's not heavy enough to hold in the elements that we breath. It's unfortunate but it looks like we're stuck here.
Not sure what this guy is talking about with Venus. Next best bet for a backup of the Earth would be underground on the moon. It's close enough we could have regular flights to supply it, theres some gravity, natural protection, and we're finding there may be water deposits. There are already large natural cavities from lava flows.
Really probably depends on how the money was being handled once in the hands of the foundation. If it went to a sizable salary for the founder, yea pretty much sounds like the scam every sane person assumed this company to be anyway. If it went to something else that was in line with their mission statement (no matter how insane their mission statement may have been) then no not really.
If someone took a serious look at their financial records, wouldn't surprise me in the least to find a lot of scammy shit going on, but innocent until proven guilty has to apply still. At least the company went belly up before they got to the stage of Russian space race Wylie Coyote blasting people off strapped to rockets. Forget killing people on Mars, these idiots were going to end up killing people on Earth in fiery death traps.
The dust storms arenâ(TM)t that dense though. The skies wonâ(TM)t normally be blackened, the light will just be more diffuse. Solar cells will still work.
I'm not going to believe this until Netcraft confirms it.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Nobody thought they would make it right?
Some people just get their ideals from watching too much SyFy channel. Mars is not human friendly in the least, if were smart we will wait to go there with robots intelligent enough to actually do real exploring and provide good research. Not send human's on some sort of one way ticket suicide mission.
Their main management team was composed of marketing experts. As I recall, there were very few scientists.
This whole venture felt like it was just a way for a bunch of salespeople who didn't care enough about science to get into it full time to boss actual scientists around.
;-)
That's OK, there's nothing to breathe so you simply suffocate before you can feel "less thermal loss".
Why 100,000,000? ... ... ...
But lights on a runway are a lifesaver.
And I'll bet Bas Lansdorp has put a lot of those $100 million into his own pocket..
I am shocked! SHOCKED, I tell you! Who could possibly have expected that this was a scam? /sarcasm
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
1/2
ShanghaiBill opined:
This is a good thing. We need to stop obsessing about Mars. Once humanity moves off-earth, the dumbest thing we could do is settle onto another planetary surface. We would just be moving from one gravity well to another. The asteroids should be our colonial target.
I could not more heartily agree.
Mars gravity is less than 40% of Earth's - but that's still a pretty major barrier to launching anything (people, for instance) from its surface into orbit, where an actual spaceship (i.e. - one that was built in zero g, and designed to shuttle stuff from orbit around one gravity well to orbit around another, without itself ever actually landing on a planetary surface) can transport it across interplanetary space. By contrast, even Ceres (the largest object in the asteroid belt) has only a sixth the gravity of Luna - not weak enough for a human to be able to achieve orbit by jumping off its surface, but also not strong enough to require enormous amounts of reaction mass for such a spacecraft to reach escape velocity.
C-type asteroids (aka "carbonaceous chondrites") should be excellent sources of organic raw materials for manufacturing plastics, etc. M-types are likely to be rich sources of highly-corrosion-resistant nickel-iron (aka "meteoric iron"), easily transformed into structural material (easy, because it doesn't need to be smelted). And 16 Psyche - to which NASA will be launching a probe in 2022 - may well be lousy with radionuclides and other heavy metals (think "rare earth elements") for reactor fuel and high-tech, microgravity manufacturing.
Yes, there will be plenty of challenges involved in establishing a permanent human presence in the asteroid belt - but the same is absolutely true of Mars, which offers all the disadvantages of colonizing a planet, and (ubiquitously-available sub-surface water aside) very few of the pluses.
As I see it, the major attraction of colonizing Mars is the "romance" (which is to say, "the public's awareness of and interest in") of the destination. Even people who have zero interest in space know it's the prime candidate for an eventually-self-sustaining human colony. By contrast, mention colonizing the asteroid belt, and most people will respond, "Why would you want to do that?" closely followed by "Is that even possible?"
Way back in the 1960's, I read Raymond Z. Gallun's book The Planet Strappers, a young adult novel about a group of teenagers who share the goal of becoming asteroid pioneers. It presupposes relatively-inexpensive launch-to-orbit technology, a permanent, multi-facility human presence on the Moon that provides fuel and resources for the kind of spaceships I mentioned earlier, and a network of orbital facilities, including shipyards and drydocks for them. The protagonist and his friends are able to earn enough money on the Moon to purchase low-cost, personal spacecraft called "bubbs" to then pilot to the asteroid belt (which already has a substantial, permanent human presence) to attempt to make their fortunes and achieve their shared dream. It's a vastly-underappreciated gem of 60's-era "hard" science fiction (which is now in the public domain!) and I heartily recommend it to everyone who isn't an aspiring anti-space-colonization troll.
Full disclosure: in light of the knowledge we now have about conditions in space, Gallun's "bubbs" wouldn't work, of course (not just because each is powered by a pocket nuclear reactor, but because the cosmic ray flux in interplanetary space, outside the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, is too high for humans to survive the long periods of exposure required to reach the asteroid belt in what, essentially, is a plastic bubble), but his book opened my eyes to the advantages in easy access to essential resources that colonizing asteroids, rather than planetary surfaces could provide.
And I still think that's where we ought to be focusing our efforts ...
Check out my novel.