 Well, it's just about everywhere in the news, so today on Vintage Space, we're going to look at the Mars One mission. Mars One is a Dutch not-for-profit company hoping to colonize Mars with a series of one-way missions. The plan for the moment is to launch the first unmanned mission in 2018, a rover in 2020 that will seek out the best spot for a settlement, a spot north enough to have water in the soil but equatorial enough for ample sunlight, and then six cargo missions will follow in 2022. At that point, the rover will set up the habitat and life support units in anticipation of the first crew arriving in 2024. More crews will follow in later favorable launch windows. It's not quite the same, but the Apollo program gives us a pretty good benchmark for discussing Mars One, and really a lot of the potential problems boil down to funding. Mars One says that it can send its first crew to the red planet for just $6 billion, and having done it the first time, subsequent flights will only cost $4 billion. That is an absolute shoestring budget. The Apollo program cost about $20 billion in 1970, which is roughly $120 billion today. Granted, NASA was basically inventing every piece of the spaceflight puzzle as it went along, whereas Mars One has five decades of human spaceflight knowledge to lean on. But still, the technology and physical hardware to actually land humans on Mars and extract consumables like water and oxygen from the soil for those people to live is pretty far from ready to launch. And the funding model for Mars One is kind of questionable if we again use Apollo as a benchmark. The bulk of Apollo's funding came in the mid-1960s. The program was getting 66 and 70% of NASA's total budget in 1966 and 1967, respectively. Those were the years where the biggest pieces of technology came into development and were tested extensively. After that, flying the missions to the moon was actually comparatively cheaper. By 1972, the year of the last two moon landing missions, Apollo was taking up just 24% of NASA's total budget. So where is Mars One's funding coming from? There are investors and crowd funders giving money to the mission. However, the bulk of the funding is slated to come from the whole thing being aired as a reality TV show. Between ad sales and TV deals, the mission will get its funding. So that means the bulk of the funding would come after the technology was developed, after the time when you actually need the big funding to bring this hardware to life. Because the reality show would be about the astronauts training and flying to Mars, the bulk of the funding would come late in the program, which seems like a bit of a backwards funding model. And Mars One's price tag is so relatively low at $6 billion because the mission plans on using as much existing hardware and technology as possible, like rockets and spacecraft that already exist. Though the website doesn't make it entirely clear what companies will be supplying, it said hardware. So we have a mission with an incredibly ambitious timeline, it depended on technology that doesn't exist yet and a funding model that may not support the model of the mission. Seems like there are a few problems with the way this mission is going forward. But then again, it is a private mission, so it's possible that Mars One is developing all this technology and the public just doesn't know about it, but we'll have to wait and see. The best thing about Mars One might be that it's getting people thinking and talking about interplanetary travel, but with a mission this ambitious, it's kind of taking the reality out of the challenge and might be doing a disservice. So what do you guys think of Mars One? Do you think it's going to launch on time? Do you foresee any major problems with the mission? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And for more on my thoughts on Mars One, check out the latest article on Vintage Space. If you love old, timey space things, be sure to follow me on Twitter as AST Vintage Space for daily content. And with new episodes going up right here every Tuesday and Friday, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.