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One-Way Trip – Chinese Join Race to Mars over 600 Sign up for Dutch Project
Saturday, May 4, 2013 3:08
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Chinese join race to Mars, over 600 sign up for Dutch project
Beijing: Over 600 Chinese have applied to join an ambitious Dutch aerospace project that plans to send humans on a one-way trip to Mars for permanent settlement.
The Dutch project, while triggering enthusiasm to explore outer space, is also under fire with the trip being viewed by some as a suicide mission, with applicants being shipped to a planet that is uninhabitable by humans.
Image for representation only. Reuters
The project, Mars One, is being launched by a Dutch non-profit organisation, and is scheduled to take four humans to the Red Planet in 2023.
In the first three days after it was launched this week, over 20,000 people from all over the world submitted their applications online, with more than 600 coming from China, state-run China Daily reported.
Bas Lansdorp, co-founder of Mars One told the media in Shanghai that he is confident of turning the dream into reality, and plans to attract more than five lakh applicants.
The Chinese enthusiasm to travel to Mars is building up as China, which has a well funded space programme focussing on Moon missions and building a space station is planning a three-phase Mars space missions to collect samples from the Red Planet by 2030.
The three stages are remote sensing, soft-landing, exploration and return after collecting automatic sampling, according to Ouyang Ziyuan, China’s Chief scientist for Lunar missions
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that’s what you call a Chinese take-away