Michael McDonnell has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He has a physics degree. He’s worked in hazardous environments. He hopes these qualifications will convince a selection committee that he’s the perfect candidate for the first human voyage to Mars.
So far, it has. He is among the final 100 candidates — 50 men and 50 women — chosen by the nonprofit Mars One, narrowed down from an initial candidate pool of 200,000.
McDonnell is prepared to spend seven months in a space station the size of a small kitchen with three other people, no toilet and no shower. And he’s prepared to part ways with his wife, Michelle, despite one difficult detail about the trip: If chosen to go to Mars, he would never return. Ever.
But McDonnell recognizes the sacrifice he’s making. “There is that human factor. You can’t touch that person again,” he said earlier this week, with his wife still in orbit.
The privately-funded Mars One mission is the brainchild of Bas Lansdorp, a Dutch engineer who co-founded the project in 2011. The organization aims to land the first four-person team on the Red Planet, an honor that has for decades belonged to rovers. And even then, half of those unmanned missions have failed.
Mars One is a reality TV level grandstanding venture, and is doomed to fail from the start, IMO. But I'm not in the least surprised there are so many fools out there that have lined up to commit suicide.I'd want to be as absolutely certain as I could be that this mission was as reduntantly safe as humanly possible. Martyrdom is not appealing to me. When it comes to 'Big Space Travel,' the national resources of a state entity like the USA, is far preferable than some private corporation. The current and historical NASA/Private sector contractor relationship model works quite well, as we all know. So, how much would I sacrifice to be the first person to go to Mars? Everything, but only if it was a NASA mission. To read more, click here.