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."

Comments

Anybody serious would be at Amundsen–Scott

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[jwhyche]

I think I agree. Plausible is probably a much better word. There is lot of unknowns and lots of things can go wrong with things we don't expect.

Like a year ago I did some experiments with Universal Sandbox on moving Venus to different orbit for terraforming. I thought that I could just add energy to the motion of the planet and it would move to a higher orbit. Nope. It did something I didn't expect. I dropped it in to the sun.

It took me several days to get the simulation right. What I learned is you have to change the orbital motion slightly at certain points in the planets orbit to achieve the desired outcome. Other wise you drop it into the sun or eject it from the solar system. After I got it right I was able to put venus in a stable orbit between mars and earth, in the goldielock zone while keeping all 3 planets in a stable orbit.

Something else happened in that experiment just by sheer luck. In one of the experiments I sent the orbit of venus out beyond mars. The orbit turned out to be stable, so I left it there and left the simulation running. When I came back, according to the simulation, the surface temperature had dropped from 300C to 62C.