From the days of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, humans have long dreamed of placing men on Mars, our closest planetary neighbor. A non-profit group called Mars One is currently researching ways to feasibly make the trip to Mars and start a colony there. However, new research from MIT shows that men may not be able to withstand the conditions on Mars for very long, even if scientists found a way to help people survive the months-long trip.
Last year 200,000 people signed up to join the colony Mars One hopes to start on the Red Planet. The trips would be one way, with no current plans to return. Mars One planned to have four astronauts go out initially, to build the colony themselves. The organization would later send more people to join them. However, the would-be colonists would likely die in just 68 days, researchers from MIT said after examining the Mars One plans.
The Mars One project was founded in 2012. The company hoped to start building a colony on Mars, which would be completed by 2025.
One problem with the Mars One plan, for example, is that the organizers hoped to use plants imported from Earth as a sustainable food source, but in Mars' atmosphere, the plants would produce too much oxygen. This would eventually cause all of the colonists to die from asphyxiation, unless a system was used to remove some of the oxygen from the air. Technology that would allow people to do this, in space, does not currently exist.
The Mars One organizers might also be overly confident that settlers could extract drinkable water from soil on Mars by heating it. The technology to do something like that has not been developed yet either, the MIT team said.
The researchers also pinned the initial cost of transporting four astronauts to Mars at about $4.5 billion. There is also not currently a feasible way to safely transport any humans to Mars. NASA is considering the use of hibernation to transport a crew of six to Mars, but more testing needs to be done on the harmful effects of long-term hibernation, and the technology is a long way off from safe use, making a 2025 completion date for a colony on Mars a bit unrealistic.
The MIT researchers did not say that the Mars One mission could not work, but they were pointing out some holes in the plan that need to be considered.
"We're pointing to technologies that could be helpful to invest in with high priority, to move them along the feasibility path," said Olivier de Weck, who works at MIT.
