The final 100 candidates for a one-way trip to Mars through the Mars One project — a space mission funded by reality TV — have been chosen. Among those lucky (or unlucky, depending on your attitude) souls are seven Australians; three males and four females of varying ages, who are competing for a chance to live, and die, on the red planet.
Meet The People Who Would Leave Earth For A One-Way Trip To Mars
Mars One is a grand mission to foster human settlement on Mars within the next decade, but it’s not a massive NASA or ESA or Russian or Chinese space undertaking — it’s an entirely private enterprise, and it’s going to need at least $8 billion of backing coming from a reality TV series on the potential astronauts’ training and the eventual mission.
Out of these final 100 candidates — whittled down from a group of 660, itself whittled down from over 200,000 initial applicants — a total of 24 will be chosen to complete astronaut training, and within the next decade would find themselves travelling on one of six three-year-long, one-way flights beginning in 2024.
MIT says the colonists will almost certainly die before their time if they ever end up reaching Mars, likely from starvation but also possibly from an eventual and gradual depletion of oxygen. But let’s cross that bridge when (and if) we get to it.
What comes next for the candidates willing to go on such a daring trip to Mars? http://t.co/bfCR435uFO #Mars100 pic.twitter.com/bg91JxpdHT
— Mars One (@MarsOneProject) February 16, 2015