Why would anyone want to sign up for a one-way trip to Mars? Especially when, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you’d die up there within 68 days, if you ever managed to arrive? The 50 women and 50 men who have been shortlisted for inclusion on such a trip – conceived by the Dutch company Mars One and optimistically slated for 2024 – have been asked that quite a lot in the last few days.
Mostly, the 100 hopefuls say that they’ve always found space fascinating, and would like to do something truly extraordinary with their lives. They’re earnest and idealistic, sometimes already seeming a little bit other-worldly. There’s Ryan MacDonald, of Derby, who “can’t think of anything more exciting” than living on Mars. I’m particularly fond of 50-year-old Etsuko, whose self-introduction on the Mars One website says, among other things: “In her 40s she ran for seven days in the Sahara desert in Morocco to test her mental and physical boundaries. She became an ascetic mountain priest in order to live simply.”
They’re dreamers, these people. They believe that it’s better to travel hopefully than it is to arrive. I certainly understand why they want to go to Mars a lot better than I understand why people want to go to Syria and join Islamic State.
Mars One is a project that’s sneered at a lot. But I’m rather taken by its grandeur of vision and its utopian sensibility. No qualification was needed to apply to join the mission, beyond the wish to be considered. This surely beats companies such as Virgin Galactic and Space Adventures, for which space travel seems remarkable largely because of its high-end tourism potential.
Much as I pray that Leonardo DiCaprio and Lady Gaga will not end up disappointed in their hopes to fly Virgin Galactic, it does seem a bit of a waste to reserve space as a playground for the wealthy when they have so many playgrounds on Earth already. Mind you, prices at Space Adventure start at $4,950 [£3220], which hardly seems a snip until you remind yourself that a frock with that pricetag would be considered a bit of a poor show at the Oscars this weekend.
Space, in recent times, has been designated an entrepreneurial marketplace, where progress is driven by the need for profit. Much of this derives from Nasa’s decision to move to a market approach in the 1990s, and it has been an unequivocally good thing. Lots of people work in space technology, around the world, collaboratively, and they do rewarding, fascinating, useful work. But it captures the public imagination only at significant moments, and even then the public imagination can move on very quickly to, oh, I don’t know – bad-taste shirts.
Mars One is entrepreneurial in spirit too, and is counting on the usual modern income streams such as sponsorship, merchandising and crowd-funding. But the concept has built-in bad-taste-shirt appeal too. Mars One has hopes of a reality television show about the progress of the putative astronauts and their project. No one, as yet, is biting, it’s true. The project is caught at the moment between the grandiosity of its vision and the dullness of watching people spend a decade packing. Yet that dismissive attitude is quite irritating, too. It’s such a good idea for a television show, documenting a genuine effort to put together a project such as this, residing as it does on the outer limits of possibility. What is wrong with the world?
I guess that, keen as we all are on happy endings, the prospect of watching people work obsessively towards some lonely, live-streamed death from radiation sickness doesn’t appeal. We’re all surprisingly well versed in the privations of life on a lonely plant, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar being just the last in a long line from David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth and Elton John’s warning that “Mars ain’t no place to raise your kids”.
I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t come to that, and so is every expert in the world who doesn’t work for Mars One. Again, it’s the hopeful travel that is the grand narrative. The arrival doesn’t even bear thinking about. Mars One is a romantic idea. Its magic lies in its enthusiastic pursuit of the impossible; a pursuit that would be fascinating in all respects, heroic even in failure – or especially in failure. It’s what Donald Rumsfeld would call an unknown unknown, and that should inspire curiosity, not cynicism.
People around my age are quite fond of saying that, when they were kids in the 1960s, they assumed that by now we’d all be travelling by jetpack, eating meals in pill form and getting our robots to throw away our disposable clothes when we were finished with them. Oh, and computers. Computers were going to be important. No one imagined that men on the moon would be a thing of the past.
Yet the space race of the cold war was more than a bit creepy. It’s actually rather nice that when two men start an attempt next month to spend an entire year on the International Space Station, they will be an American and a Russian, together. For me, Mars One is the apotheosis of that kind of progress, a positive human story amid so many that are more like nightmarish visions of the past. Hannah Earnshaw, a 23-year-old hopeful, puts it simply and well: “It will be an incredibly diverse group of people from many different countries, cultures and backgrounds working together to represent the human race on a new planet, backed by the investment and support of millions of people across the world.” There people might not get to Mars. But their willingness to try is quite astounding enough.