After the Mars One Mission announcement in April about giving civilians a one-way ticket to Mars, over 200,000 people have signed up. The sign-up period has been officially closed and before the year ends, four lucky people will be chosen to join the second trip in 2025.
The first mission will be unmanned but is the "most important and most difficult step of actually getting humans to Mars," said Bas Lansdorp, co-founder and CEO of Mars One. The first mission will test the technology that can allow humans to live in the red planet.
"The highest priority is to actually have liquid water on Mars," he told CNN .
So far, Mars One has already established its main suppliers for its first launch in 2018. This unmanned mission will include a robotic lander and a communications satellite. Both spacecrafts' construction and design will be studied separately by Canada-based Lockheed Martin and the U.K-based Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd.
The Mars One probe is equipped with cameras that will continuously shoot video recordings as well as feed them real-time to Earth, which will be the first ever synchronized live feed from Mars to Earth.
Experiments will also be conducted during the first Martian probe. One will show how water could be produced on the Martian surface and the others will be scientific experiments proposed by university contest winners.
The second Martian launch was originally set for 2023 but had to be moved to 2025 which include the first four people. Every two years, the mission will send additional four people. Lansdorp also mentioned that he is planning to develop space vehicles that can carry more than four people.
Sending people to the red planet is pretty big news but the efforts-- in finances and scientific study-- to make it possible is a lot more enormous. The Dutch company has settled an agreement with its suppliers and has planned for how the company and its sponsors would return their investments, but that there is much to be seen in the next five years when the first unmanned Mars probe will be launched.
