What celestial body will humans set foot on next? It could be on a comet or asteroid and it could be the Moon (again). But there’s an excellent chance it could be Mars. It’s bound to happen eventually, but until then the prospect of a manned Mars exploration will tantalize explorers — and bankrupt companies.
Going to Mars just makes sense.
In our solar system, Mercury and Venus are way too hot, while the planets from Jupiter onwards are too cold and too gaseous. Mars is, by far, the planet most similar to Earth in the solar system.
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Someday, there could be human colonies on Mars.
It’s speculative, but Mars would give us space for our ever-expanding population. Theoretically, humans could one day have the technology to terraform Mars, bringing an atmosphere and liquid water to the red planet.
We’re there already (kinda).
NASA has sent four successful unmanned vehicles, or rovers, to Mars in the past few decades. The currently active rover, Curiosity, beams surface-level pictures back to curious earthlings every day.
What’s stopping us?
Space exploration is enormously expensive, and federal space agencies like NASA have been significantly defunded since the height of the space race. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, agencies have largely cooperated on smaller-scale missions.
Enter private enterprise.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX grabs a lot of headlines, but there are scores of other privately-funded space exploration initiatives. Naturally, some of these proposals involve sending people to Mars.
One such company was Mars One.
A small Dutch company, Mars One, had the ambitious plan of sending humans to Mars to live out the rest of their lives. The program began crew selection in 2011.
They must be nearly ready to go!
Um, about that…if you were a backer of Mars One, there’s bad news: the company just went bankrupt. The news was broken by a Redditor who found a bankruptcy notice when perusing Swiss financial records.
The company’s not giving up, exactly.
In an update , the company announced that while one arm of its mission has declared bankruptcy, they intend to continue to find investors and continue the project, somehow.
For observers, this wasn’t too surprising.
Despite their headline-grabbing move to give humans a one-way ticket to Mars, the company’s plans never seemed particularly achievable. From the start, they likely misrepresented the outside interest in their project.
No one knew how they’d get to Mars.
When traveling in space, it’s pretty important to have a good vehicle. Mars One did not have any kind of aerospace hardware. Instead, they proposed holding a reality show to fund development.
Experts crunched the numbers.
A pair of MIT graduate students compiled a feasibility report a few years ago, concluding that Mars One had drastically underestimated how much money and logistical planning was necessary for such an epic mission.
The company lost faith with investors.
They kept changing their schedule. Five years after they kicked off the project, they announced that they were delaying things for at least five years, pushing the first manned mission to 2031.
Ultimately, the company just collapsed.
Aside from their brief update this month, Mars One had maintained radio silence on their website for about half a year. They’d also been juggled through various investment groups over the past few years.
Turns out we’ll have to wait awhile to go to Mars.
If there’s any consolation here, it’s that it’s better to trust an entity with a realistic plan than one with an implausible plan. We’ll probably get to Mars — it just won’t be particularly soon.
