Washington – Leila Zucker remembers the ping of her inbox that launched her on this quest.
Dan Carey remembers the tears on his wife’s face when they discussed his outrageous plan. He wanted to land his name in the history books. She wanted to know: “You would leave me?”
Derrick Johnson remembers the moment a bartender asked, “Hey Derrick, how’s that Mars thing going?” He remembers his heart lurching. Right then, he was standing next to his new boyfriend. The boyfriend he hadn’t expected. The boyfriend who didn’t know that Derrick had spent his whole life striving for something bigger than himself, so he had signed up for the biggest something he’d ever heard of.
“What Mars thing?” the boyfriend asked.
Derrick stuttered and stumbled, trying to explain, as they all must have done, Leila and Dan and the 202 583 other people who had applied for this seemingly crazy thing, this life-ending thing, this trip to the planet Mars.
“Wait, I read about that,” the boyfriend said. “Isn’t that ...” he slowed, stressing each word. “... a one-way trip?”
The name of the organization that could be the first to put humans on the Red Planet is Mars One. “One,” as in, yes, one-way. It will launch people into space, land them on Mars and attempt to keep them alive for the length of their natural lives – but it won’t be bringing them back.
One-way is cheaper, according to the entrepreneur, physicist and physician masterminding the Mars One project. One-way is more technologically feasible. One-way, they believe, can happen in the year 2024.
NASA has no public plans to attempt a human landing on Mars until the 2030s, and even then, it will certainly be NASA astronauts who take the trip.
So what the Dutch not-for-profit endeavor promised was groundbreaking: Anyone could apply. With a decade until takeoff, Mars One founders reasoned that they don’t need the most experienced, educated or credentialed astronauts.
They need people – four for the first trip, and four every two years after that – who can psychologically handle spending the rest of their lives with only each other on a planet no human has ever set foot upon.
Then and now, the skeptics abound. Some say the technology to survive on Mars isn’t nearly where it needs to be. Some doubt they can raise the funds to do it. Some are convinced it’s all a scam. But no one can prove that the plan is impossible – and for thousands of people, that was enough to put their faith in it.
Mars One is nearing the end of its nearly two-year selection process to narrow more than 200,000 applicants into 24. Those candidates, broken into six teams of four people, will spend eight years training and preparing, while competing against each other to determine which group will leave for Mars first.
To help fund the estimated $6 billion trip, their experiences will be broadcast on television.
Today, 660 candidates remain in the running.
You might assume that these people must be some kind of crazy; that they must hate their lives or harbor a death wish. But interviews with 10 of them and application videos made by hundreds of others show a group of people who seem pretty normal. Incredibly ambitious, but sane. Sixty-three have PhDs, and 12 are physicians. They are lawyers, pilots, veterans and businessmen. They come from all over the world: Moscow, Madrid, Miami Beach. The youngest were 18 when they applied, and the oldest was 71.
They are people who want to leave a mark on our planet – by leaving our planet.
On Friday, they will learn if they have made the next cut, from 660 to 100. Until this week, the candidates have been able to wait and wonder with no immediate pressure to commit to leaving the planet.
But if they make it through to 100, things start to get serious. They will have to look at their lives and declare if they really want to keep going, if they really want to make it into the cadre of 24 who will abandon it all. Grass. Beaches. Rain. The slobber of their dogs. The voices of their parents. The smiles of their children. All of it, to live on Mars.
Washington Post-Bloomberg