Mars One is a non-profit organization that plans to establish a permanent human colony on Mars by 2025. The private spaceflight project is led by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, who announced plans for the Mars One mission in May 2012, who revealed the details of the mission in an exclusive interview with the Voice of Russia.
Mr. Lansdorp, how did the idea of Mars One project come to your mind?
I came up with this idea when I was 20 years old. It arose in my mind at university when I saw the pictures of the first NASA Mars rover. When I saw them on TV, I wanted to go to Mars myself and that's why I started deciding my own mission.
I'm Dutch, not American or Russian, and I knew that my chances to go with NASA or with Russian Federal Space Agency were very small. I thought the only way I could do this is to organize my own mission to Mars. This was a long time ago from now, recently we've found a feasible way of financing Mars One and that is when I decided to go for it. So I've been working on this for the last three years by now.
Can you say what you are facing: more criticism or support regarding your ambitious project?
I think anyone who hears about our plan for the first time is always very critical of it. But then, when I tell them the details: that it's a mission of permanent settlements which can be achieved with existing technology; that we have contracts with Lockheed Martin, Surrey Satellite Technology and Paragon Space Development; that we also got advisors from NASA, a team of astronauts and a Nobel Prize-winner - people become very enthusiastic about our plan.
What skills an astronaut should have to be chosen for this mission?
Actually the most important thing that we are looking for in our applicants is the ability to work as a team. The biggest challenge of going to Mars is not engineering, medicine or botanic skills as people need to grow their own food, the biggest challenge is for people to be able to live with four people in isolated space for years. They will have to depend on each other with their lives, with everything they have for three years before the second crew arrives. That's going to be the biggest challenge. And then, of course, they need to be healthy and they need to be smart to learn engineering skills and medical skills, and botanical skills, but most importantly we are looking for team players.
Can we say that only the best of the best people will be participating in this project?
Well, we have received more than 200,000 applications and we've selected just over 1000 of them to go to round number two. So you can imagine that we have very high selection criteria. But even from those 1000 people we expect that we will need to eliminate quite a few of them because they will prove to be not qualified, especially when we put them in isolated conditions here on Earth to test them for their big journey to Mars.
In that case, can you talk a little bit more about the process of selecting the applicants and how is it going on?
We started with about 200,000 online applications and we narrowed down nowto about 1000 people who are going to be entering round two. There are about 50 people from Russia, 20 male and 30 female. And that is not a big surprise we have so many applicants from Russia as your country is a very highly-educated and space-minded nation. The next step will be to narrow down the applicants and put them in a copy of the Mars outpost here on Earth. Then we will have to test them for the things that they will meet there: the isolation, the time delay when you communicate with your friend and family at home, growing your own food, dealing with emergency situations.
What effect, do you think, will this project have on science?
Well, the project of Mars One is not just about science, but about exploration. Of course, when you want to go to Mars you'll have to do a lot of scientific research. The most interesting of it will be the studying of the Solar System on the Red Planet. Our astronauts will be able to find much more details about the planetary system than on Earth as Mars is older than our planet. We will also try to find the answer to the holy grail of scientific research - if there is the life outside the Earth. And Mars is one of the places where we could find such life so that is one if the topic that our astronauts will certainly be interested in.
