CNN
If you have ambitions of being one of the first people on Mars, listen up: A Dutch company says it is moving along with its plan to send four lucky Earthlings to colonize the Red Planet. The catch: They won't ever come back.
The Mars One foundation announced Tuesday that it has secured lead suppliers for an unmanned mission launching in 2018, which involves a robotic lander and a communications satellite. Lockheed Martin has been contracted to study building the lander, and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. will develop a concept study for the satellite, Mars One said.
Mars One, the project to send humans to Mars on one-way missions, said it is delaying its timetable for those missions by several years.
Mars One — the private venture formed to send people on a one-way trip to the Red Planet — is getting ready to whittle down its astronaut hopefuls from 100 people to just 40
When Joseph first signed up with Mars One — the media-hyped, one-way mission to colonize the red planet being floated by a Dutch non-profit — he didn’t think much of it. The former NASA researcher said he never really took the application seriously; he was just putting his hat in the ring mostly out of curiosity, and with the hope of bringing public attention to space science.
But eventually Joseph — who is actually Dr. Joseph Roche, an assistant professor at Trinity College’s School of Education in Dublin, with a Ph.D. in physics and astrophysics — found himself on the group’s shortlist of 100 candidates all willing to undertake the theoretical journey. And that’s when he started talking to me about the big problems he was seeing with Mars One.
I had my doubts about it from the beginning. There is no way that any real corporation would financially support a suicide mission.
Now with Dr. Roche's breach of non-disclosure contract, it's obvious that this was simply a shoddily put together scam.
“If you are offered payment for an interview then feel free to accept it. We do kindly ask for you to donate 75% of your profit to Mars One.”
Was a Nigerian Prince one of the finalists?
Those 200000 people are nuts. Yea it'd be cool to be in the history books as one of the people who ventured forth to expand the reaches of mankind any but it's really just a death sentence. These people will never be back and i suspect that they won't even make it to the destination either. If by some miracle they make landing, I'll be shocked if they lasted a full calendar year