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Aspiring Martian Defends Mars One on YouTube After a Very Bad Week

The mission has taken a beating lately, but its supporters are sticking up for it.
​Image: Mars One

No one said going to Mars was going to be easy, so it's hardly be surprising that Mars One has now delayed its whole ti​meframe by two years. Over the last week, however, the private, not-for-profit mission to colonize Mars has been facing a more terrestrial problem: bad PR.

Joseph Roche, a former Mars One finalist, outlined his concerns to the journalist Elmo Keep, which turned into a scathing piece in Matter, wherein the mission's "secretive selection process" was called "hopelessly, and dangerously, flawed."

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According to Keep, mission finalists advance not based on their merits as potential Mars colonists, but based on how much money they raise for the mission.

Mars One candidates took to Medium t​o refute the allegation that Mars One is pay-to-play. The company still has ten years to sort all of this out, they said, and if it were a scam, it's unclear who is profiting.

Mars One astronaut candidate Ryan MacDonald also took to YouTube to correct Keep's article with the video above titled "10 Reasons Mars One Is Not a Scam." From his armchair in front of his DVD library, MacDonald takes on Roche's claims about payment and nondisclosure agreements.  He doesn't address that the mission might not be possible.

At least the Apollo mission was completed by the time it was called a scam. Still, even if you think the critics don't have vision or imagination, what they do have is a point.

While Buzz Aldrin is dead-set on a mission to Mars, other former astronauts have vocally questioned whether Mars One is the one to do it. In a speech at an aerospace symposium, former Canadian astronaut Julie Payette cast aspersions on the mission's selection process, saying that "the only courage any of the thousands of potential candidates had was to sign up on the Mars One website," and also that the candidates "are not going anywhere in 10 years because the technology needed to go to Mars doesn't exist," according t​he CBC.

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At least the Apollo mission was completed by the time it was called a scam

Keep has been a vocal critic in a sea of enthusiastic media coverage of Mars One.Last November, she outlined why going to Mars was far ha​rder than Mars One was making out it out to be, and that contrary to statements on Mars One's website, the technology doesn't exist. This echoes sentiments laid out by researchers ​at MIT in a feasibility study.

There's a huge gap between Mars One's goals and where it is now. Mars One ha​s crowdsourced $784,380, but its own estimates put the cos​t of a mission at $6 billion. A NASA panel, on the other hand, estimates "the total cost of a 20-year program culminating in a manned mission to Mars in the range of $80 to $100 billion," according to National G​eographic (although that also includes the cost of a return mission).

In February, Space News reported that the mission doesn't have contracts with aerospace suppliers to de​velop or build the equipment to get to or live on Mars. Mars One also lost the TV ​deal that was supposed to, at least partially, pay for the mission. It claims to already have another lined up.

When I was chatting with Mars O​ne finalists a month ago, biologist and writer Chris Patil qualified everything he told me with a variation on "if it works."

"It's possible, but by no means certain, that Mars One will take us to the Red Planet in our time," he said. "But if we don't, it's close to 100 percent certain that people who are kids today will settle the solar system. And I want them to see us taking this seriously, and get excited about playing a role in humanity's early steps off the planet. If we play this right, Mars One could be this era's Apollo program, a brilliant dream that brings a whole generation into scientific careers."

Maybe everyone doubting Mars One is a hater. Maybe they're all a bunch of statists and ex-NASA employees who resent the intrusion of the private sector into space. That's all possible. But that doesn't change the fact that Mars is an average of 140 million miles away and that Mars One is still on the ground.