News
report today; a local news report on a very slow local news day. Amid
endless film of flooding, and anticipation of a football match I care
not a jot about, was a feature about a local fellow who has made it
to the last 1000 potential candidates for the Mars One mission.
Mars
One is no ordinary space mission. Unlike the Apollo moonshots, where
JFK stressed the importance of the “Bringing them safely back to
earth” bit, Mars One isn't selling return tickets.
It is a
one way mission.
Now,
they aren't planning to crash the astronauts onto the surface of
Mars, although I have to say that my first thoughts were of a modern
day Golgafrinchan B Ark designed to remove Earth's cretins from the
gene pool in an imaginative fashion. They are going to give them
everything they need, carrying out initial construction of a
habitation using unmanned robot vehicles, before launching a human
crew to their new world, with no probability of return.
Two
years later, after the initial crew has successfully got the colony
up and running, and expanded it sufficiently, a supply rocket arrives
with more colonists aboard – think “Shipwrecked – the Rivals”
from Channel 4 – and so on.
Eventually
a fully fledged colony is up and running, that might perhaps get on
with serious work like rare mineral mining, or perhaps terraforming.
The
“Shipwrecked” analogy is an apposite one, because Mars One
doesn't have any large scale financial backing. The enormous costs
for the mission will be met through TV Advertising, because as much
as a space mission, Mars One is a reality TV show. The 8 month
voyage, the colonisation, the forever of it, is a celestial Trueman
Show. And who should be surprised, for Mars One is a Dutch project,
the nation that brought you “Big Brother”.
It may
sound crazy on the surface of it, but there is an impression out
there that sooner or later, the only way we are going to make these
great leap forwards into interplanetary or interplanetary space is
through one way missions. But surely by highly trained, highly
psychologically assessed professional astronauts initially, not
tabloid friendly prone to breakdown backstoried cuties – and
financial pressures will mean it will end up that way. No-one is
going to watch 24 or so REAAALLLLLY BOOORING people sit on their
backsides in a space capsule for 8 months, before eternity in a
series of what will essentially be Martian space sheds, each one sod
all bigger than the Diary Room. Nope, there's got to be hotties, and
there's got to be stories.
To be
honest, they may not have to try very hard. The pressures on the crew
will be immense – the boredom, the lack of privacy, the fact that
there will never be a way home or no way to see families again. There
will be suicides. There will be a guy who's habit of drumming his
fingers on his chair, or farting, or constantly clearing his throat,
will cause knuckles to whiten. There will be arguments...fights...
There
will be sexual tension too. Imagine being the guy on the mission that
no girl – or guy – fancies. The guy – or girl – you hate is
the one who is getting the action. Imagine them in bed, having sex in
the most filthy, sweaty way, low gravity orgasms, blood swelling
engorged organs...and nowhere to go to escape it.
It
would be too much to bear.
The
certainty is that the first manned reality mission to Mars, would
result in the first murder on another planet. Someone would get it, a
space shower head cracked over a skull, strangulation with coolant
cable. A geological axe through the spinal column, suffocation in a
space helmet.
Someone
will get it. And if no-one gets it, no-one will watch any more. And
when that happens, no more revenue. And all the astronauts die
anyway, as they run out of money for supply rockets and communication
systems, and Mars' first colony becomes a futuristically materialled
tomb.
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10.01.14
