Mars One Ventures, a Dutch company that planned to send humans on a one-way trip to Mars and start the first human colony on the Red Planet, has been declared bankrupt.
The company hoped to send people on a one-way trip to Mars where they would settle for the rest of their lives as we on Earth watched it all unfold from the comfort of our couches. However the company that aimed to put humanity on the red planet has met an unfortunate, but wholly-expected end.
News of the company’s demise was only revealed thanks to a Reddit user who found a court notice from Basel, Switzerland which said it was declared bankrupt on January 15, 2019, officially dissolving Mars One Ventures AG.
It was the brainchild of Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, previously the founder of green energy company Ampyx Power.
Mars One began accepting applications in 2013 for a mission to establish a permanent settlement on Mars. It planned to launch a total of 24 people in groups of four every two years starting in 2024. The company is reported to have received around 200,000 applications, and went through the process of whittling them down to 100 — and here’s who made the cut.
Mars One was split into two ventures, the non-profit Mars One Foundation and the for-profit Mars One Ventures. The Swiss-based Ventures AG was declared bankrupt by a Basel court on January 15th and was, at the time, valued at almost $100 million. Mars One Ventures PLC, the UK-registered branch, is listed as a dormant company with less than £20,000 in its accounts.
Yesterday afternoon, Mars One posted an update to its website saying that the commercial arm is “currently working on a solution with an investor.” The company also reiterated that the nonprofit is still functioning.
Mars One has long been embroiled in controversy over its dubious plan to send people to Mars, where they would supposedly live out the remainder of their lives. The company promised wannabe astronauts that it would send them to the Red Planet to start the first human settlement, but that it would not return them to Earth as it lacked the technology to get them off the planet.
The group said it had 200,000 willing participants, but this was disputed by former NASA researcher Joseph Roche, who had volunteered for the project and said the real number was 2,761. He also said the selection process had a points system which could be increased by buying merchandise or donating money to the company.
Mars One's overambitious goals were seen as questionable, given the economics of reality TV compared to the cost of a rocket launch. Researchers at MIT took issue with many of the project's claims, suggesting that Lansdorp's plan would quickly kill all of the colonists.
The entire enterprise had the whiff of a "too good to be true" scam surrounding it, and we're just glad that things stopped when they did, and not after 100 people were left on Mars with nothing but a cheese sandwich — it would have been the FYRE Festival on an interplanetary scale.
So ends the mission hopes of Mars One, and the 100 people who thought that reality television would get them to the red planet. Thankfully, NASA and SpaceX are still planning missions, and none of them involve Martian villas, Martian Ja Rule, or any kind of reality television program.
