Elmo Keep, our Digital Director, has written this truly excellent and in-depth piece about the planned 2025 one way voyage to Mars. David Willson is one of the few people inside NASA who cautiously thinks what [Mars One - Human Settlement of Mars] is doing is kind of cool. He’s Australian, too, and an unabashed nerd who proudly points his webcam around the walls of his office to show me his framed Star Trek posters and faked UFO photographs on his mantle. Willson’s currently at work on the Icebreaker 2020 Mars Lander mission, which is seeking funding to send an unmanned craft to explore the planet’s northern pole, where it will drill down into the ice in further search of proof of life. It’s a chicken-or-egg proposition. What Mars One is trying to do is to be the egg that attracts chickens, he tells me. If they create a market for the development of this technology, then private companies will be racing to get the costs down to fulfill the demands of the market. But the technical challenges of getting people out of low Earth orbit and into deep space remain vexing. Then there’s the problem of what happens after they arrive on Mars. — All Dressed Up For Mars and Nowhere to Go, by Elmo Keep on Medium
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 06:34:09 +0000
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