Musk's Mars Plan

During a one hour speech at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara Mexico, on September 27, Elon Musk, laid out his plan to colonize Mars. 

Musk described the giant rocket that will allow this project to happen. Said rocket would be about 3.5 times more powerful than the current biggest rocket ever. 

For more click HERE

Mars One Now Has a Short List

At the point in time when Mars One stopped taking application for a one way trip to Mars, they had amassed 200,000 applications.   Now Mars One has pared down the application base and in doing so has eliminated over 99% of the applications under consideration.

Mars One's list now contains only 1058 applicants.  The percentages now according to a recent Popular Science Article:

• 55 percent of the new applicant pool is male and 45 percent is female. That's more masculine than the general population, but still substantially more gender balanced than U.S. Congress.
• 63 percent have a bachelor's degree or higher, while 3 percent of the total hold medical degrees (who wouldn't want a doctor on Mars?). Less than 7 percent of people on Earth in 2010 had college degrees, which means Mars may soon be the most educated planet in the solar system.
• 76 percent of applicants are employed, 15 percent are still in school, and 8 percent are unemployed. If surviving as a colonist on another planet counts as a job, expect Mars to have an employment rate of 100 percent.
• 43 percent of applicants come from the Americas, 27 percent from Europe, 21 percent from Asia, 5 percent from Africa, and 4 percent from Oceania. That hardly jibes with the distribution of the world population; if it did, 60 percent of Martians would be Asian and 14 percent would hail from the Americas. A closer match is the distribution of global wealth by nation, of which the Americas claim 35 percent.

As the article points out, the news ... bring a private mission to the red planet one step closer to reality.  The next step for  Mars One is final crew selection, for putting humans on Mars by 2025.

Mars 1 Way, Closer to Reality - Starting To Sound Like It

Yep, I have visited this subject a few times before, but it is beginning to like more than a complete pipe dream.    Earlier this week Netherlands-based private spaceflight project Mars One announced that Lockheed Martin and Surrey Satellite Technology have been contracted to quote :

• "study and develop concepts for a Mars lander and a data link satellite, respectively, for a 2018 exploratory mission."

If both systems are in place and operating successfully by 2018, then Mars One feels it can start and hopefully have a human settlement on Mars by 2025.   As you can see by these dates, both missions have been pushed back a couple of years due to delays.

There are some interesting factoids on the Popular Science page, which you can  find  HERE