(KTVI)-Go to Mars and never come back. That is the goal of more than 1,000 finalists selected by the Mars One program. Mars One is a privately-funded plan to establish a human colony on Mars starting ten years from now, in 2024. It is a colonization mission. That means it’s a one-way trip, no return trips to earth.
Established by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, Mars One is raising money through donations and expects most funding will come through revenues from a reality TV event that will chronicle the trip and the first few years of life on mars.
NASA had said a bare-bones mission to Mars would cost $100 billion. Mars One claims it can be done for around $6 billion. Skeptics say the project will never fly at all, that cost estimates are way too low, and the project doesn’t have the huge amounts of funding necessary to pull it off. Despite that, 200,000 people worldwide applied to go on the mission. They’ve now been whittled down to 1,058 potential Mars colonists.
Charels Jaco sits down with two of those finalists, who are from St. Louis. Maggie Duckworth, 29, lives in Bridgeton and is trained as an electrical engineer. She owns a business making and supplying costumes. Tim Gowan, 26, lives in University City. He’s an Aerospace Engineer at Boeing and is also an actor and filmmaker.
