A nonprofit organization that aims to land four astronauts on Mars in 2023 will begin its search for the four luck astronauts with televised search this summer.
The Netherlands-based Mars One will begin accepting application videos in July, charging a fee to weed out folks who aren't serious about their candidacy. Not to be confused with millionaire Dennis Tito's plan to send two people to fly to Mars and back in 2018, the Mars One colony project aims to land four astronauts on Mars in 2023.
The non-profit says by doing a televised two-year search for the astronauts, it hopes to raise millions of dollars with the proceeds paying for the ongoing selection process and technology studies.
Mars One co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp said that they expect to receive a million applications with 1 minute videos.
"We expect a million applications with 1-minute videos, and hopefully some of those videos will go viral," Mars One co-founder and chief executive officer Bas Lansdorp told SPACE.com on April 10. He was in London to speak to the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) that day.
Lansdorp said that Mars One already has 45,000 people registered for its mailing list and has already received 10,000 emails from interested individuals.
To apply, applicants must be 18 years and older.Application fees will vary from country to country, with folks from poorer nations getting a price break, Lansdorp said. The maximum fee will apparently be $25. Mars One hopes to have 24 astronauts by July 2015, who'll then be organized into six teams of four people. Each team will face seven years of training, including spending three months at a time in a replica of the Mars colony.
"We will give them all the most stressful situations," Lansdorp told the BIS audience on April 10, adding that the training base will have a 40-minute communications delay to replicate the time lag that would exist due to the vast distance between Earth and Mars.
Click here to apply and for more information on Mars One.
