(Image: Sam Williams)
BAS LANSDORP gazed in awe at the landscape of Mars. NASA’s latest mission had revealed a blood-red world scattered with boulders, dunes sculpted by ferocious winds and hills beckoning on the horizon. “The images of on TV inspired me,” he recalls. “I thought: ‘I want to go there’.”
There was one big problem. NASA had calculated the cost of a human mission to Mars at $500 billion – clearly a non-starter for a NASA astronaut, let alone a private citizen.
That was in 1997, when was an engineering student at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Fast-forward 16 years and the world of Mars exploration has been turned on its head. The first people to reach the Red Planet may not be astronauts from a government space agency, but private individuals. Two companies – Mars One, which is headed by Lansdorp, and Inspiration Mars – this year announced plans to take volunteers to Mars at least a decade earlier than any government mission (see diagram).
But can they really pull it off? Plenty of people are taking them seriously. “These ideas are right,” says , the second man on the moon. “And they will go a long way towards increasing enthusiasm for missions to Mars.”
The first chinks in NASA’s monopoly of Mars appeared in the 1990s, when , then an aerospace engineer at Martin Marietta, studied its ambitious plan known as the . “It made no sense to me,” he recalls, “because it’s not the way we’ve explored Earth. When we’ve done it intelligently, it’s by living off the land.”…
