Hello everyone!  Welcome to Have Mars Suit – Will Travel, which I hope will become a sizable compendium of my research and thoughts on the Mars One project.  I’m a current candidate for their astronaut training program, but intend to keep posting and following the progress of the Mars One project whether or not I’m selected into future rounds.

Mars One is a privately funded attempt to put human feet on Mars.  It’s planned as a one-way mission, and Mars One hopes to raise funds for the project by filming and televising the astronaut training and selection process.  It’s an ambitious and fascinating and slightly insane scheme, and I’m been fascinated by the the opportunities it provides to talk about topics ranging from engineering to psychology to sociology.

In future posts, I hope to talk about such things as,

• Were they really 200,000 applicants?
• Will this actually work?
• What will Mars One still accomplish even if it never sends astronauts to Mars?
• What lessons have we learned from previous similar projects (including Mars 500 and Biosphere 2?)
• Why should we spend time and money on this? (Couldn’t we be ending world hunger instead?)
• Funding a Mars mission by means of reality TV…is this as dangerous an idea as it sounds?
• ….and many more things, as I think of them.

I hope you’ll stick around for the journey.  If you’d like to know a bit more in the interim, please check out the “About” page.