DailyDirt: People In Space

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Hundreds of thousands of people have already applied for a one-way ticket to Mars for the Mars One program to establish a human colony on the red planet by 2023. Funding for Mars One is expected to come from a reality TV show as well as sponsorships and donations -- and even IP licensing from any technology it develops along the way. Mars One appears to have collected over $150,000 in donations so far, so there's at least some interest in the concept (though the total cost for a Mars trip could easily be billions). Here are just a few more links on some other plans to get humans into space.

• The odds of vasts amounts of ice existing on the moon are looking pretty grim. Without a significant amount of ice on the moon, potential lunar colonies would have to bring their own water -- and that would make it a lot more expensive to live on the moon. [url]
• Mark Burnett has been pitching a reality TV show for putting contestants into space since the late 1990s, even selling a show called Destination Mir to NBC in 2000. Burnett's latest space-themed reality show would put an ordinary person on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. [url]
• Sony Pictures Television is launching a reality TV show on Dutch broadcaster Nederland 1 called Milky Way Mission that will have (local Dutch) celebrities competing for a seat on an XCOR spaceplane via the Space Expedition Corporation's (SXC) space airline. The first season will have eight 1-hr episodes that will might end in a blast off to an altitude of 340,000 feet. [url]
• Objective Europa is an ambitious manned exploration project that aims to put people on an icy moon of Jupiter. The organizers plan to crowdfund a one-way trip to Europa, and these astronauts would face certain death even if they managed to reach Jupiter's moon. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: astronauts, colony, crowdfunding, destination mir, europa, jupiter, manned exploration, mark burnett, mars one, milky way mission, moon, reality tv, space
Companies: sony pictures television, sxc, xcor