Over 100,000 people are willing to make themselves feel at home on another planet. Each hopes to be one of the chosen fews to spend the rest of their lifetime in Mars after filing the application for a one-way trip to the “Red Planet.”
The Mars One project, the organization setting up the manned missions, likes to inhabit the red planet, shipping people beginning 2022. Financial and practical questions – like “Will people really be able to stay alive on Mars?” or “Will there be sufficient money?” – are some unanswered queries about this project. But this vagueness in the scheme didn’t halt 30,000 hopefuls from signing up.
Bas Lansdorp, Mars One CEO and co-founder, said in an interview with CNN, "we can take a look at some candidates on the Mars One’s website but they are just a portion."
Lansdorp added, “There is also a very large number of people who are still working on their profile, so either they have decided not to pay the application fee, or they are still making their video or they're still filling out the questionnaire or their resume. So the people that you can see online are only the ones that have finished and who have set their profiles as public."
Given the probable risks of the space travel, the founder of Mars One is certain of the project’s viability. Conversely, a number of space travel experts have accounted that the risks are way too high to continue these manned missions to the Mars with a distance that has never been reached by any human.
NASA spaceflight radiation officer, Eddie Semones, highlighted that the space agency does not include health effects of Mars colonization in their study and shorter recognition missions of the exterior of Mars is their focus. The radiation in Mars is much higher than Earth but that is none of their concern and the applicants were made aware of all the risks prior to signing up.
Applicants are not required to have a college degree but need to be at least 18 years old, intelligent, mentally and physically fit, and willing to undergo eight years of training in preparation of the flight. The first round of selection is still ongoing and intrested applicants can still register online.
