By Garrett Speller
Would you take up the opportunity for a one way trip to mars? 100 “Lucky” candidates were pulled from a pool of over 660 people from ages 19 to 60, and these candidates will than have to show their abilities and teamwork skills to be selected for four man (or woman) teams. The Dutch non-profit organization, called Mars One, has set up a ground plan for the trip. The astronauts would arrive in teams of four to rover-built structures on the surface, using plants to produce their oxygen and obtain water from frozen ice on the surface of Mars to get water. These concepts all sound well in good in theory, but they may work out differently in practice. MIT has looked at some of these concepts and said in a study: “For example, if all food is obtained from locally grown crops, as Mars One envisions, the vegetation would produce unsafe levels of oxygen, which would set off a series of events that would eventually cause human inhabitants to suffocate.” This is obviously problematic, and it is made worse by the fact that no technology for removing such oxygen has been successfully developed and tested for use in space. And that’s even if the Mars One teams could get to the red planet. MIT also noticed that the number of rockets estimated for the trip is much less than the number which would be actually needed. “We’re not saying, black and white, [that] Mars One is infeasible,” Said MIT Professor Olivier De Weck, but he definitely thinks that under the concepts he has proposed, this colony on Mars would not last long. Mars One has acknowledged these concerns, but there has been no comments thus far. There have also been reports that Mars One’s precursor robotic missions have stopped (the robots would be setting up the habitats for the colonists), but Mars One again declined to comment. Going to Mars is something that would definitely be a large step for humankind, but if a trip in the next few years would result in one hundred quickly dead astronauts on mars, It would quickly be more symbolic than scientific. If mankind could wait for the technology to keep these people alive and establish a livable and scientifically beneficial colony, Mars One could do a lot more then just be a coffin for the “lucky” 100 first people going to the red planet.
