Applicants aplenty for one-way ticket to Mars
More than 100,000 people have already applied for a one-way ticket to Mars. Yes, Mars.
Mars One is a project by the Mars One Foundation that wants to establish human settlement on Mars in 2023. On April 22, Mars One opened the door for anyone interested in traveling to Mars to apply.
“A one-way mission to Mars is about exploring a new world and the opportunity to conduct the most revolutionary research ever conceived, to build a home for humans on another planet,” says the Mars One official website.
But there are a few requirements for those who wish to make the journey.
Besides being 18 or older, applicants must pay a fee that varies according to nationality.
An American faces a $38 application fee, while someone from Mexico will be charged $15.
The price is based on the gross domestic product per capita of each nation. The cost should be high enough for people to really think about and low enough for anyone to be able to afford, Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp told CNN.
The project accepts applicants from any country and offers 11 languages to apply in: English, Spanish Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, Korean, Indonesian and Japanese.
Applicants must be free from any diseases and dependencies on drugs, alcohol and tobacco. They must have functionality in all joints, 20/20 vision and free from any psychiatric disorders. Healthy physique is a must, blood pressure should not exceed 140/90 and height must be between 5-feet-2-inches and 6-feet-3-inches, according to the project’s website.
Out of the tens of thousands that have applied, Mars One will choose a multicontinental group of 40 astronauts this year. Four of them—two men and two women—will take off in September 2022 landing on the red planet in April 2023. Another group of four is set to land in 2025 and every two years after that in hopes to eventually colonize Mars, according to the project’s website.
Each Mars-bound person will be put through a required eight years of training. Isolated from the world for a few months, cultivating crops in confined spaces and how to handle serious medical conditions will be among some of the skills the chosen astronauts will learn.
But Mars One isn’t the only group hoping to make history by sending people to Mars. The Mars Iniative, Mars Society, MarsDrive and Mars Foundation are a few other groups currently attempting to send people to Mars.
NASA is working on cutting the travel time to Mars by the 2030s, but that won’t happen for a while, Chris Moore, NASA’s deputy director of advanced exploration systems, told CNN this year.
While the possibility of life on Mars is yet to be proven, one thing is certain—if successful—coming back to Earth will not be an option.
For more information on the project and possibility of life on Mars, visit Mars-One.com
Compiled using Review-Journal News Services.
