Mars One

The proposition was simple enough to explain in a sentence, which was most of its power. Send four people to Mars, do not bring them back, send four more every twenty-six months, and pay for all of it by selling the world the right to watch. Bas Lansdorp, a Dutch engineer who had built and sold a wind-energy business, and Arno Wielders, his co-founder and technical lead, put this to the public in 2012 with a first landing in 2023. The one-way design was not carelessness. Returning from Mars requires a vehicle that can launch from the Martian surface, which is the single most expensive item in every government Mars architecture ever drawn, and deleting it genuinely does halve the problem. What it does instead is transfer the whole burden onto the surface systems, which must then work indefinitely with no possibility of retreat. That is the part Mars One never costed, and the part every serious critic went after. It is worth being precise about what the organisation was and was not, because the popular account has flattened it. It was two entities: a Dutch non-profit, the Mars One Foundation, and later a Swiss for-profit, Mars One Ventures AG, which held the commercial rights and was listed on the Frankfurt exchange. It employed people. It signed contracts. It was not a man with a website.

It was, however, a man with a website compared with what it needed to be. What Mars One bought with the money it raised was paper. Paragon Space Development Corporation was contracted on 12 March 2013 for life support concept studies. Lockheed Martin produced a demonstration lander concept study based on the design of NASA's Phoenix, which really had landed on Mars in 2008. Surrey Satellite Technology Limited produced a communications orbiter concept study. Those are real companies and those were real contracts, and every one of them was a study rather than a build. There was no launch agreement. SpaceX, routinely named in coverage as the launch provider, confirmed it had no contract with Mars One and no Mars One launch on its manifest. Set against that, the published figure for the first four-person landing was six billion dollars, an estimate English Wikipedia attributes to Lansdorp himself and for which Mars One never released working. What actually came in is harder to pin down than it should be: English Wikipedia records 928,888 dollars from donations and merchandise up to 4 July 2016 and 313,744 dollars from an Indiegogo campaign run between December 2013 and February 2014, while the same article elsewhere carries an estimate that the venture received tens of millions in total. Those two accounts cannot both be complete and we could not reconcile them. Either way the gap to six billion was to be closed by broadcast rights, and Lansdorp is reported to have told a 2015 audience that Mars One could earn eight times what the Olympics earns from television. The only television deal it ever had, with Endemol's Darlow Smithson Productions, was under discussion from June 2014 and over by February 2015.

The applicant numbers are where the story turns from optimism into something harder to defend. Mars One announced that more than 200,000 people had applied to go, and that figure did more work than any other single fact in the project's history: it was the proof that an audience existed, and therefore that the funding model was real. In March 2015 Joseph Roche, an astrophysicist at Trinity College Dublin who had reached the hundred-strong shortlist, said publicly that the number of completed applications was 2,761. English Wikipedia records that Mars One afterwards confirmed that figure in a YouTube video. Both numbers can be technically defensible, because they measure different things: one counts people who began a form, the other counts people who finished one. Only the larger was ever put in a press release. Roche's other statements were harder to explain away. He described a regional interview process that had shrunk to a ten minute Skype call, containing factual recall questions and no psychological or psychometric assessment of any kind, for a mission whose entire premise is that the crew will never come home. He described shortlisted candidates being asked to donate to Mars One whatever they earned from media appearances. His stated motive for speaking was that he did not want to be attached to something that would damage the public's trust in science.

The engineering verdict arrived first and was largely ignored. In October 2014 an MIT team presented an independent analysis at the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto. MIT News names Olivier de Weck as the leader of the group, with the graduate students Sydney Do, Koki Ho, Andrew Owens and Samuel Schreiner; Do is the lead author of the paper. Simulating the habitat Mars One described, they found the first settler would suffocate after about 68 days. The mechanism is instructive because it is not the obvious one. The crops required to feed the colony would push the oxygen concentration to dangerous levels; controlling that requires continuously introducing nitrogen to dilute it; the nitrogen supply would deplete; and the habitat would then have nothing left with which to make up its own leaks. They also calculated that fifteen Falcon Heavy launches would be needed to deliver the initial supplies where Mars One assumed six. De Weck was careful about what he was claiming: not that Mars One was infeasible, but that it was not feasible under the assumptions it had made. Do put it more bluntly, calling the plan inherently unsustainable. A year later, at a public debate reported by Dwayne Day in The Space Review, Lansdorp is described as conceding that the published plan was not really the plan, that he said different things to journalists than at technical conferences, and that there was no detailed technical plan at all.

It ended in a courtroom nobody was watching. Mars One Ventures AG, the Swiss for-profit that held the commercial rights, was declared bankrupt by a court in Basel on 15 January 2019. No announcement was made. The fact was found a month later by a member of the public reading the Swiss commercial register, and reached the press on 11 February. Trading in the Frankfurt-listed shares had been suspended on 5 February for non-compliance. Lansdorp said he was working with other parties to find a solution, and that the Mars One Foundation still existed but could not act without further investment; it did not act again. What was and was not real can now be stated plainly. Real: the organisation, the contracts for concept studies, the candidates, the fees they paid, the years some of them arranged their lives around it, and, as far as anyone can demonstrate, Lansdorp's own belief. Not real: any spacecraft, any launch agreement, any life support system, any funding, and the 200,000 applicants. The most useful thing about Mars One is not that it failed but why so many people wanted it not to. It offered a date. Every government Mars programme offers a decade, and always has, and Mars One's genuine insight was that a specific year in the near future is worth more attention than any amount of engineering credibility. That insight was correct, and it is the reason the entry needs writing carefully rather than dismissively.