If Mars One, a private, not-for-profit marketing organization based in the Netherlands, achieves their goal, four humans will permanently inhabit a colony on Mars in only eleven years. Should this happen, Mars One will have established a settlement on Mars before any other aerospace organization will have even had the chance to orbit the planet.
According to Mars One, the crew, which is being determined from 4,227 completed applications, will begin training next year. Departing Earth in 2026 for a seven-month, one-way trip, they will arrive on Mars in 2027, where two rovers will have already built the settlement. The next four settlers, and the next round of supplies, will be sent 26 months later, in 2028, and every 26 months thereafter. The mission is possible so soon because the technology to reach, construct, and sustain this settlement already exists. The establishment of the settlement, and the initial journey, will cost $6 billion (every subsequent mission would cost $4 billion), and could be funded through donations, crowdfunding, stockholders, and a reality television show about its participants. However, this information is all according to Mars One; according to others, none of this will ever happen.
Ever since 2012, when Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp announced his project, co-funded one year earlier with engineer Arno Wielders, he and Mars One have been heavily criticized for generous estimates of cost, funding, technology, timeframe, and general feasibility. Indeed, their intentions seem particularly lofty when considering that NASA has vowed to be the first to get to Mars, and does not plan on orbiting the planet until 2030, nor landing an astronaut until around 2060. Or considering that a 2014 NASA panel estimated that merely sending someone to orbit Mars would cost $80 to $100 billion. Or, in referencing their reality TV show concept, that ESPN, the most profitable media branch in the world, had operating earnings of only $4 billion in 2015. Or that Mars One has already fallen short in their crowdfunding goals, raising only a total of $759,816 in donations as of February of last year, and admitted that they are likely to face further delays.
Then there is the study published by two graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2014, which dismantled every prediction about the feasibility of Mars One. The study estimated that merely getting the crew and equipment to Mars would require 15 rockets, rather than the estimated six, and that the transport of crew and cargo alone would cost $4.5 billion. Furthermore, the annual cost would increase exponentially as more people are added, more resources are depleted, and as the technology suffers further damage on the planet’s stormy surface.
The paper also found that the sheer number of crops and the 200 square meters of growing space that would be required to support four people on a 3,040 calorie per day diet would produce toxic levels of oxygen. The MIT students said that because no technology currently exists to filter out oxygen without filtering out nitrogen—a gas crucial to maintaining air pressure—a resulting drop in pressure would kill the first settler in only 68 days.
And yet, in the face of rampant doubt, the Mars One team remains optimistic. They point to their statistic that the 2012 London Olympics made $4.5 billion in only three weeks through sponsors and broadcasting rights, and estimate that their show will be similarly popular among what they say will be four billion people with internet access in 2027. They denounced the authors of the MIT report as mere grad students, and claimed that the authors had made many incorrect assumptions about the mission in their paper, which led to false predictions. In addition, Mars One stated that a machine to filter nitrogen does exist, and claimed that this lack of knowledge shows that the students’ predictions are unfounded. Mars One have continued to communicate with aerospace suppliers and engineers, and have narrowed their pool of applicants down to a mere ‘Mars 100.’
Ivan Padilla, a graduate student from the University of Toronto (UofT) currently working in experimental astrophysics, is among those that doubt the project will ever take flight. When considering Mars One, he says, “I think we also have to look at who’s doing this. [Mars One] are not an aerospace company, they’re a marketing company. Never in history has a private company done something like this—historically it’s been nations.”
Padilla’s concern has been reiterated by many, including Dr Joseph Roche, an astrophysicist and one of the final 100 candidates who has recently stated that Mars One was cavalier about proposed safety concerns, and they prioritized potential income from candidates instead of which candidates would be best for the job.
This then intensifies the ethical issues that Padilla also finds pressing. “Is it right to send people up there to die?” he asks, referencing the one-way nature of the trip. Though, considering the number of proposed flaws in safety, and the many gruesome ways the settlers are predicted to die, this question becomes all the more relevant.
Not all UofT space students agree, however, as Farasha Rahman, a third year astrophysics student, believes the mission will land successfully. “I don’t think it matters what company is running the mission, I think it’s the job of mankind as a whole to think one step further,” she says. Because the participants are each volunteers, she and Mars One also find that there is little ethical grey area in that sense.
Past the practicality, there is also the fundamental question of why. Mars One cites three motivations: “the realization of an amazing dream… good, old-fashioned curiosity… [and] progress [as] this mission will jumpstart massive developments in all kinds of areas.” However, there are more dire reasons as to why the settlement may be important, as global sea levels have risen an average of 7 in the past century and continue to rise, the arctic continues to lose 13.4 percent of its ice each decade, and nine of the ten hottest years the world has ever recorded have occurred since the year 2000.
Farasha Rahman believes Mars One will come to fruition, considering, she says, that “Earth has already been environmentally damaged. We, as the human race, need this project to be able to live on [as a species].”
Rahman echoes the same concern Stephen Hawking, a famed astrophysicist, has outlined in recent years; he is firm in his stance that “it will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is… to spread out into space.” Hawking recognizes the gravity of the primary threats that could extinguish our species. These include threats brought on by humans, including climate change and the potential for devastating nuclear and biological warfare, threats from the universe itself, such as asteroids or supernovas, and threats from potential alien forms of life.
Mars may be the answer to preserving our existence, and Mars One are admirable in their persistence and positivity. But, as any child aspiring to be an astronaut must eventually uncover, it takes much, much more than dreaming to get to space.
By Alexa Battler
Please note that opinions expressed are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views and values of The Blank Page.
