Is Mars One ready to colonize the Red Planet? MIT engineers say no

Tuesday October 14, 2014 08:02 PM

By Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times (MCT)

A team of engineers at MIT that studies the technology needed for humans to live on other planets has determined that the Mars One plan to send four people to colonize the Red Planet by 2025 is not possible.

The claim they make is that no new technology is required for their mission, said Syndey Do, a doctoral candidate in aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the lead author of the study. Our numbers show that is not feasible.

Mars One is a nonprofit organization based in the Netherlands that has boldly promised the world to send four people on a one-way trip to Mars by 2024, with an additional four people arriving every two years.

To finance the mission, the Mars One team has proposed a reality TV show in which 40 aspiring astronauts from around the world would compete to be the first people to settle on Mars.

The MIT team was already at work on building what they call a settlement-analysis tool (its a computer model) that would help them understand what was needed for humanity to live on another planet. After chatting about the Mars One project in their office one day, they decided to use their tool to see whether the Mars One plan had legs.

Their results are published in a 35-page report on the MIT website.

It was a really good intellectual exercise for us, Do said. And it tested some of the modeling capabilities that weve been trying to develop.

To test the feasibility of Mars Ones plan to have colonizers grow all their food, the team built a simulated Martian habitat, put in data on how crops grow in space and then put in ideal growth conditions. Even with those ideal conditions, the Mars One would need an area four times larger than the one it had planned, they said.

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Is Mars One ready to colonize the Red Planet? MIT engineers say no