More than 1,000 candidates — from 200,000 hopefuls — have been chosen to train for a private Mars colonization mission to be partly funded by a reality TV show following their training and subsequent steps, organizers said on Thursday.
They are to be whittled down to just 24, who will be sent over six launches starting in 2024, according to Mars One, the Dutch-based non-profit group behind the audacious endeavor.
The only catch is that the space-bound settlers will be on a one-way ticket to the Red Planet, which lies a minimum 55 million kilometers — six months’ travel — from Earth. Costs are too high to contemplate a return trip.
Mars One said the selected 1,058 would-be emigrants to Mars, from 140 countries, were informed on Monday they were the lucky few deemed to meet the criteria — including an “indomitable spirit,” “good judgement,” “a good sense of play,” disease and drug-free, English-speaking — to be interplanetary pioneers.
“The challenge with 200,000 applicants is separating those who we feel are physically and mentally adept to become human ambassadors on Mars from those who are obviously taking the mission much less seriously. We even had a couple of applicants submit their videos in the nude,” organization co-founder Bas Landsdorp said.
The group’s chief medical officer, Norbert Kraft, said the candidates would now be called in for “rigorous simulations, many in team settings, with focus on testing [their] physical and emotional capabilities” over the next two years.
The candidates will be narrowed down in a number of phases starting this year. Mars One said that process was caught up in “ongoing negotiations” with media companies over television rights.
The organizers announced last month they had signed a US$250,000 contract with US group Lockheed Martin Space Systems to build a concept landing module that would be sent in a 2018 unmanned test flight.
It hopes to add more sponsors and partners to its roster to help cover the US$6 billion cost of its plan, which would see self-sufficient living modules shot off to Mars.
Key to that is an interactive reality TV program built around the project in which the audience decides which candidates make the cut for the one-way mission and which stay behind on Earth.
Cameras are also to follow the settlement of Mars as those it calls “a new generation of heroes” conduct experiments and work out how to live long and happy lives in airlocked pods, growing their own food, far from their native planet, in a new habitat with a thin, unbreathable atmosphere and sub-zero average temperatures.
Crowdfunding — appealing for public donations, mainly through the Internet — is also meant to finance the task of turning the entrepreneurial dream into reality.
Mars One counts a Dutch 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics winner, Gerard ’t Hoofd, among its supporters.
However, there are many skeptics, too.
NASA chief engineer Brian Muirhead reportedly said in April last year that a commercial venture to colonize Mars is “way beyond our capability to do today.”
NASA’s plan is to put an astronaut on the dry planet in a couple of decades.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion