Dubai: The head of Mars One — the mission that will send humans on a one-way trip to Mars — was in the UAE on Tuesday to woo investors and scout for possible locations for its Mars simulation outpost on Tuesday.
Bas Lansdorp, chief executive and founder of Mars One, said the Mars One project was well received by the groups and individuals he had business meetings with on his one-day visit to Dubai.
“Dubai is really the right place for something like Mars One because the people here are used to thinking big. In Holland, this is seen as something that’s almost impossible. In the US, it’s seen as something as very challenging but possible. Here in Dubai, we see that because there are so many huge projects going on, it’s seen as something much closer to reality,” Lansdorp told Gulf News.
Mars One is a ten-year project that aims to bring the first human permanent settlement in Mars by 2026 costing $6 billion (Dh22 billion). Although the controversial project has met a lot of scepticism from many fronts, Lansdorp said he has found a different audience in Dubai.
“In one of the meetings that I attended, one of the ladies said, ‘It’s actually because it’s [Mars One] so ambitious, because it is so difficult, that we are interested in it.’ That is a very different attitude compared to what we find in a lot of other places.”
“Dubai is so full of energy and so full of optimism and that is what we need for people who want to be part of our mission.”
The UAE showed interest in Mars exploration by launching its own Mars mission earlier this year to send an unmanned probe to the Red Planet in 2020. Although both parties share a keen interest in Mars, Lansdorp said both missions are still far away and are in the very early stages of development.
What is most likely, he said, is building the simulation outpost here to mimic Martian conditions and allow the Mars One crew to survive and co-exist by next year.
“Dubai’s desert areas have a view of Mars which is very good and we need to build a copy of that outpost here on Earth to test our crews. So we will place our crews in isolation in a simulation outpost to train them to really get used to the idea.”
If the two shortlisted UAE residents, namely, Ritika Singh and Mikolaj Zielinski make it to the final round of selection, they will be among the 24 crew members who will train and learn to survive in this simulation outpost.
But to get things moving further, Lansdorp said Mars One is in the process of raising $15 million until the end of winter. This will help them fund the remaining conceptual design studies, the lander and life support and other components of the mission such as hiring experienced team members to work on the project.
