I don’t at all believe that Mars One is ever reaching its destination, let alone by 2024, but the project as a whole–and the search for astronauts who wish to live permanently on a cold and inhospitable planet far from all they know–is like one enormous psychological research project. Richard Hollingham of the BBC spoke to the person responsible for choosing the astronauts who wish to die on Mars and probably never will:

This is the pitch: a perilous one-way journey to a dead, distant world, leaving your family behind for the rest of your life, before dying 225 million kilometres from the planet you used to call home.

“It’s something you really have to want from your heart,” says Norbert Kraft, chief medical officer for Mars One. “It’s a calling, like being a war reporter.”

In fact, getting shot at is one of the few hazards you are unlikely to face on Mars. Unless HG Wells was right or things go very badly wrong.

Despite the obvious downsides, more than 200,000 people from around the world have applied for Mars One’s mission to establish a permanent human settlement on the Red Planet.

The non-profit organisation plans to raise the money, build the spaceships and launch the first colonists within the next decade. Whatever the practicalities of this ambitious target, Kraft has been appointed to help choose the first potential Martian settlers.

He is certainly well qualified to lead the selection. After training as a medical doctor in Austria, and with a background as a doctor in the Austrian military, he has spent 20 years working with the US, Russian and Japanese space agencies studying the suitability of astronauts for long duration space missions.•