Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2014

ASTRONAUTICS ficially established in 2011 on the initiative of the en- gineer Bas Lansdorp and the physicist Arno Wield- ers, and quickly achieved a certain notoriety, to the point that the number of applicant settlers has ex- ceeded 200,000 in just a few years, despite the fact that included in the “holi- day package” of those who will be finally select- ed there is also their sure death on Mars. In fact, the various 4 peo- ple crews that every two years, starting from 2024- 2025, will leave for the exotic destination will on- ly hold a one-way ticket. Such little rosy outlook does not however seem to have deterred these prospective settlers, confident of living a long, even if con- straint, life. This at least until the begin- ning of October, when a feasibility assess- ment of the Mars One mission conducted by the MIT engineers was made public, ac- cording to which this project, in its current form, can only turn out to be a failure, if not a disaster. And this not so much with regard to the launch and transfers to Mars, all within the currently available technol- ogy, but rather the stay on the planet, which is the main objective of the program. The MIT experts, including Olivier de Weck (professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems), presented their B as Lansdorp, photographed during a confer- ence held in New York in which he announced the start of the selec- tion of prospec- tive colonizers of Mars One. [AFP-JIJI] Left, a represen- tation of the first housing module descending on the Martian sur- face. [Mars One]