Yes, that's a thought I had recently. The Mars One applicants don't seem like the sorts of people who would do extreme sports like base jumping, or cave diving or wingsuit flying,. But a mission to Mars of course would be far more risky than any of those, don't see how anyone can suggest otherwise, at this stage of technology.
Would they agree to go if you had to do a base jump as one of the tests to qualify as an applicant?.Or fly in a wingsuit? With high risk of dying in the test?
It's the most dangerous place to land on in the inner solar system - 50% of all missions there have failed - and though the US has had a string of several successes recently, the Curiosity landing was by no means guaranteed, it wasn't for nothing they called it 7 minutes of terror.
The problem is that as soon as you hit the surface you are committed and can't go back to orbit (unlike the Moon). But the atmosphere is not thick enough to slow you down to a soft landing.
And so many other issues. Nobody yet knows if humans can be healthy in Mars gravitiy - after all we evolved in Earth gravity - and get seriously ill in zero g.
In zero g- for instance pregnant women are not permitted to go to the ISS because the risk for the fetus would just be so great it's not ethical to do the experiment because of all the numerious changes in a human body in zero g. Not just bone loss - also reducing blood cell count, increasing adrenaline, magnesium deficiency - nobody has yet figured out a way to contain blood and fluids if you need to do surgery in zero g, get malnourished, dehydrated, need to do a huge amount of exercise to keep - not even fit, but just to stop your health from deteriorating so much - ...
What about Mars g? Nobody knows. Optimists say everything will be fine, sketics say that's just wishful thinking.
Nobody has yet spent 2 years in space, and no US astronaut has spent 1 year in space. Nobody has yet lived in space for more than a few months without new supplies shipped to them from the Earth and wastes disposed of back in the Earth's atmosphere. Nobody has yet built and tested a closed system or nearly closed system habitat in space.
Nobody has ever traveled so far that it takes more than 3 days to get back to Earth.
With Apollo they did many shorter missions first, such as the Gemini missions - here is a montage of all the Gemini missions they did leading up to Apollo, (Project Gemini)
then followed by another 10 Apollo missions, List of Apollo missions
Those are the Apollo missions - except for one that's for Skylab
Though we've learnt a lot since then, still, Mars is so much more of a challenge over a mission to the Moon, and we don't yet have a return to the Moon, not even send humans to geostationary orbit for decades, just continually back to Low Earth Orbit.
So - I would imagine that to send humans even to orbit around Mars - would take probably a dozen or more precursor missions to do it with reasonable level of reliability similar to Apollo.
Here is Apollo 10 nearly crashing on the Moon - came within 2 seconds of crashing before they gained control
- and without those, undoubtedly the first astronauts to try to land on the Moon would have crashed, multiple failure points, almost every stage of the journey, which they sorted out in all the previous missions. Even if they'd gone straight to the Moon with Apollo 10, cut out one precursor mission, which must have been tempting with the mission going so close to the surface of the Moon - they'd almost certainly have crashed and died.
They only succeeded because of this careful step by step approach.
Mars is far harder than landing on the Moon - borders on absurdity I think, that a small Dutch company, outsourcing everything, can get together a safe successful mission - even to the Moon would be a stretch, but to Mars....
The idea that the first mission to land on Mars with humans on board can just set off from Earth and hope to achieve success - without at least as many precursor missions as Apollo had - and - even - with a relatively unttrained crew most of whom couldn't pilot a jet fighter or make fast decisions with a cool head in an emergency
And if things go wrong they are at best, 4 minutes light speed travel time away from Earth, at worst 40 minutes return trip light speed so you ask a question of the techy specialists on Earth in an emergency - and get an answer 40 minutes later - and ever tried doing tech support by email? So many chances for confusion and misunderstandings - you sort it out eventually but in an emergency - with people panicking, and needing immediate replies - and they get an answer 40 minutes later but don't properly understand what it is they have to do and have more questions - it would probably take hours before they really understand what Earth suggests they do - and chances are mission control takes about as long to have a clear picture of what happened - by which time if it's an Apollo 13 type situation and you are trying to work out how to solve it - you might well have made the wrong decision and lost any chance of saving the mission.
But I don't think it's going to happen anyway - because how can they satisfy planetary protection? How can they prove they won't contaminate Mars, when a crash on Mars would be a major fail of planetary protection?
This is a requirement under international law - breaches the Outer Space Treaty that nearly all countries have signed - but also - ethically - just because they somehow got the funds together to send a spacecraft there - that wealth doesn't give you the moral right to spoil Mars for everyone else.
So - we need to know, what will Earth life do to Mars if we introduce it to the planet.
It - is becoming increasingly clear that Mars is potentially really really interesting for life sciences - both past and present - we want to study it in its pristine state before we decide what to do next.
It's not even as if it was a good place to colonize. Even after a nuclear war + giant asteroid strike, Earth would still be by far the best place on the Earth to re-terraform, there wouldn't be any point in going to Mars in that situation. Anyone on Mars who wants to ensure the future of the human race would be best advised to return to Earth as soon as possible to help here, if they still have the capability.
The ideas are great, the images and movies are good fun, it makes great sci. fi., but in reality - it just doesn't make sense at all.
Big expensive mission with most likely effect, to land dozens of human corpses on Mars - when there is so much we can do on Earth to help our planet - reverse desertification, etc.
And so much we can learn on Mars also, with less expensive missions that send humans, not to the surface, but to orbit around Mars where they can't contaminate the surface - exploring the surface with robots controlled telerobotically. Or continue exploring from the Earth with increasingly autonomous rovers.
All that is great - and I think their imagination might be better directed towards that.
Imagine yourself in orbit around Mars - in a Molniya orbit - comes round to the sunny side of Mars twice a Martian day - you go really close to the surface - and spend some time there controlling rovers on the surface - driving them around - with reality headsets like the Occulus Rift -
- the Mars astronauts in orbit could explore the surface with headsets like this - and haptic feedback gloves so you can feel what you are doing, and omni directional treadmills like the virtuix omni
and automatically enhanced vision
with everything you see on Mars streamed back to Earth so everyone back here can join in and see what you see exactly as you see it whenever you explore the surface of Mars.
Then after a few hours of that you see that Mars is now getting further away, becomes smaller, and then 12 hours later you come in again for another close approach and real time exploring - you can continue to explore all the time - but when you are really close you can control things on the surface in real time as if you were there.
And fly planes around on Mars, small planes, or entomopters - same design as a bumble bee.
Many other ideas like that - isn't that more fun, to operate those from orbit around Mars, than living a troglodite existence on the surface under meters thick layers of soil, going out only rarely to keep down your lifetime radiation dosage - and knowing all the time that just by being there you have contaminated Mars and made it far harder for scientists to find out interesting things about biology and alternative forms of biology and the early history of evolution?
See also
Telerobotic Avatars On Mars With Super-Powers ("Teleporting" from orbit) - Search For Life - And Long Term Exploitation
This one is about Elon Musk's idea but nearly all the things I say also apply to Mars One
Why Elon Musk's Colony on Mars in 2020s is Unfeasible - What Could We Do - Really?
Many more on http://science20.com/robertinventor
Would they agree to go if you had to do a base jump as one of the tests to qualify as an applicant?.Or fly in a wingsuit? With high risk of dying in the test?
It's the most dangerous place to land on in the inner solar system - 50% of all missions there have failed - and though the US has had a string of several successes recently, the Curiosity landing was by no means guaranteed, it wasn't for nothing they called it 7 minutes of terror.
The problem is that as soon as you hit the surface you are committed and can't go back to orbit (unlike the Moon). But the atmosphere is not thick enough to slow you down to a soft landing.
And so many other issues. Nobody yet knows if humans can be healthy in Mars gravitiy - after all we evolved in Earth gravity - and get seriously ill in zero g.
In zero g- for instance pregnant women are not permitted to go to the ISS because the risk for the fetus would just be so great it's not ethical to do the experiment because of all the numerious changes in a human body in zero g. Not just bone loss - also reducing blood cell count, increasing adrenaline, magnesium deficiency - nobody has yet figured out a way to contain blood and fluids if you need to do surgery in zero g, get malnourished, dehydrated, need to do a huge amount of exercise to keep - not even fit, but just to stop your health from deteriorating so much - ...
What about Mars g? Nobody knows. Optimists say everything will be fine, sketics say that's just wishful thinking.
Nobody has yet spent 2 years in space, and no US astronaut has spent 1 year in space. Nobody has yet lived in space for more than a few months without new supplies shipped to them from the Earth and wastes disposed of back in the Earth's atmosphere. Nobody has yet built and tested a closed system or nearly closed system habitat in space.
Nobody has ever traveled so far that it takes more than 3 days to get back to Earth.
With Apollo they did many shorter missions first, such as the Gemini missions - here is a montage of all the Gemini missions they did leading up to Apollo, (Project Gemini)
then followed by another 10 Apollo missions, List of Apollo missions
Those are the Apollo missions - except for one that's for Skylab
Though we've learnt a lot since then, still, Mars is so much more of a challenge over a mission to the Moon, and we don't yet have a return to the Moon, not even send humans to geostationary orbit for decades, just continually back to Low Earth Orbit.
So - I would imagine that to send humans even to orbit around Mars - would take probably a dozen or more precursor missions to do it with reasonable level of reliability similar to Apollo.
Here is Apollo 10 nearly crashing on the Moon - came within 2 seconds of crashing before they gained control
- and without those, undoubtedly the first astronauts to try to land on the Moon would have crashed, multiple failure points, almost every stage of the journey, which they sorted out in all the previous missions. Even if they'd gone straight to the Moon with Apollo 10, cut out one precursor mission, which must have been tempting with the mission going so close to the surface of the Moon - they'd almost certainly have crashed and died.
They only succeeded because of this careful step by step approach.
Mars is far harder than landing on the Moon - borders on absurdity I think, that a small Dutch company, outsourcing everything, can get together a safe successful mission - even to the Moon would be a stretch, but to Mars....
The idea that the first mission to land on Mars with humans on board can just set off from Earth and hope to achieve success - without at least as many precursor missions as Apollo had - and - even - with a relatively unttrained crew most of whom couldn't pilot a jet fighter or make fast decisions with a cool head in an emergency
And if things go wrong they are at best, 4 minutes light speed travel time away from Earth, at worst 40 minutes return trip light speed so you ask a question of the techy specialists on Earth in an emergency - and get an answer 40 minutes later - and ever tried doing tech support by email? So many chances for confusion and misunderstandings - you sort it out eventually but in an emergency - with people panicking, and needing immediate replies - and they get an answer 40 minutes later but don't properly understand what it is they have to do and have more questions - it would probably take hours before they really understand what Earth suggests they do - and chances are mission control takes about as long to have a clear picture of what happened - by which time if it's an Apollo 13 type situation and you are trying to work out how to solve it - you might well have made the wrong decision and lost any chance of saving the mission.
But I don't think it's going to happen anyway - because how can they satisfy planetary protection? How can they prove they won't contaminate Mars, when a crash on Mars would be a major fail of planetary protection?
This is a requirement under international law - breaches the Outer Space Treaty that nearly all countries have signed - but also - ethically - just because they somehow got the funds together to send a spacecraft there - that wealth doesn't give you the moral right to spoil Mars for everyone else.
So - we need to know, what will Earth life do to Mars if we introduce it to the planet.
It - is becoming increasingly clear that Mars is potentially really really interesting for life sciences - both past and present - we want to study it in its pristine state before we decide what to do next.
It's not even as if it was a good place to colonize. Even after a nuclear war + giant asteroid strike, Earth would still be by far the best place on the Earth to re-terraform, there wouldn't be any point in going to Mars in that situation. Anyone on Mars who wants to ensure the future of the human race would be best advised to return to Earth as soon as possible to help here, if they still have the capability.
The ideas are great, the images and movies are good fun, it makes great sci. fi., but in reality - it just doesn't make sense at all.
Big expensive mission with most likely effect, to land dozens of human corpses on Mars - when there is so much we can do on Earth to help our planet - reverse desertification, etc.
And so much we can learn on Mars also, with less expensive missions that send humans, not to the surface, but to orbit around Mars where they can't contaminate the surface - exploring the surface with robots controlled telerobotically. Or continue exploring from the Earth with increasingly autonomous rovers.
All that is great - and I think their imagination might be better directed towards that.
Imagine yourself in orbit around Mars - in a Molniya orbit - comes round to the sunny side of Mars twice a Martian day - you go really close to the surface - and spend some time there controlling rovers on the surface - driving them around - with reality headsets like the Occulus Rift -
- the Mars astronauts in orbit could explore the surface with headsets like this - and haptic feedback gloves so you can feel what you are doing, and omni directional treadmills like the virtuix omni
and automatically enhanced vision
with everything you see on Mars streamed back to Earth so everyone back here can join in and see what you see exactly as you see it whenever you explore the surface of Mars.
Then after a few hours of that you see that Mars is now getting further away, becomes smaller, and then 12 hours later you come in again for another close approach and real time exploring - you can continue to explore all the time - but when you are really close you can control things on the surface in real time as if you were there.
And fly planes around on Mars, small planes, or entomopters - same design as a bumble bee.
Many other ideas like that - isn't that more fun, to operate those from orbit around Mars, than living a troglodite existence on the surface under meters thick layers of soil, going out only rarely to keep down your lifetime radiation dosage - and knowing all the time that just by being there you have contaminated Mars and made it far harder for scientists to find out interesting things about biology and alternative forms of biology and the early history of evolution?
See also
Telerobotic Avatars On Mars With Super-Powers ("Teleporting" from orbit) - Search For Life - And Long Term Exploitation
This one is about Elon Musk's idea but nearly all the things I say also apply to Mars One
Why Elon Musk's Colony on Mars in 2020s is Unfeasible - What Could We Do - Really?
Many more on http://science20.com/robertinventor
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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