The Daily PollTHE CEO OF Mars One has hit back at critics of the project, including an Irish applicant who described it as “hopelessly flawed”.
Earlier this week, Trinity College astrophysicist Dr Joseph Roche told Medium the ranking of candidates for the one-way mission is determined purely by the amount of funding they have raised for the mission.
“I have not met anyone from Mars One in person … Initially they’d said there were going to be regional interviews… we would travel there, we’d be interviewed, we’d be tested over several days, and in my mind that sounded at least like something that approached a legitimate astronaut selection process.
“But then they made us sign a non-disclosure agreement if we wanted to be interviewed, and then all of a sudden it changed from being a proper regional interview over several days to being a 10-minute Skype call,” Roche said.
The Irishman had made it into the top 100 candidates but was booted from the programme after his comments breached a confidentiality agreement.
‘Simply not true’
However, Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp has released a video in which he disputes Roche’s claim that candidates were selected on how much money they donated to the programme, saying this is “simply not true”.
He said the mission is still feasible, and the selection process “will be much more thorough from here on”.
“We started our astronaut selection with over 200,000 applications that were submitted online. The application included a video and a lot of psychological questions for our candidates. We used that to narrow down the candidates to about 1000 that had to do a medical check, which was very similar to the check for NASA astronauts.”
Interestingly, it is not so complex to determine who is not qualified to go to Mars, which is what we have been doing so far. Our next step is to find out, from the people who we think might be qualified, which ones have what it takes. The selection process will be much more thorough from here on.
“Going to Mars is very difficult, for example NASA has been talking about going to Mars in 20 years for more than 45 years now. Of course, NASA needs a return mission which is much more complex than our one way mission but it shows how difficult Mars exploration is.”
What do you think? Will the Mars One project land people on the planet?
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