Step right up and prove why you should get a one-way ticket to Mars! Well, wait - you might want to know a little more about the venture first.
A Dutch company called Mars One began looking Monday for volunteer astronauts to fly to
Mars. Departure for the Red Planet is scheduled for 2022, landing seven months later in 2023.

The space travelers will return ... never. They will finish out their lives on Mars, representatives from the nonprofit said. "It's likely
that there will be a crematorium," said CEO Bas Lansdorp. "It's up to the people on Mars to decide what to do with their dead." Still, the company said it has received more than 10,000 e-mails from interested would-be spacefarers.
The one-way ticket makes the mission possible because it greatly reduces costs, and the
technology for a return flight doesn't exist, according to Mars One's website. At a news conference, Lansdorp maintained that "no new inventions are needed to land humans on Mars."
The biggest obstacles, he said, are financial. The company has revealed some of its sponsors and hopes to gain more via media coverage. It's not clear whether enough money
will be collected in time.

There are also practical issues: Can the kinks in having a sustainable system for people to survive in such a harsh environment be worked out by 2023?
"Questions of reliability and robustness have to be answered before we leave Earth," said Grant Anderson of Paragon Space Development Corporation, which builds life-support systems and is joining the Mars One effort. Anyone may apply, for a fee The company announced a casting call for candidates at a news conference in New York City. Anyone 18 or older may apply via video but there is an application fee - $38 for U.S. applicants. The money will fund the mission. Mars One wants to build a colony that will be able to grow with an ever-expanding crew.

The group has a plan for testing the technology that would transport people and things. The group wants to launch a supply mission that will land on Mars as soon as October 2016. A "settlement rover" will land in 2018. The landing systems will be tested a total of eight
times before they're used to transport humans, which Lansdorp says would make this
"much safer than moon missions."
The colony's budget comes in at "about $6 billion," Lansdorp said. "The $6 billion is for the first crew that goes there." By comparison, NASA's rover Curiosity, the most advanced and
biggest robot to ever traverse Mars, is a $2.5 billion mission. Where exactly the $6 billion will go remains a mystery.
Lansdrop said he didn't want to release an itemized budget because of competition. Mars One intends for a second crew to join the first one in 2025, and more will follow regularly. Each flight will carry two men and two women, so reproduction on Mars would be feasible
but not intended. "We will certainly not send couples," Lansdorp said.

At the news
conference, Lansdorp said he'd like to go to Mars himself, but he isn't because his girlfriend
won't come along. "I have a really nice girlfriend, and she doesn't want to come with me, so I'm staying right
here."
Are they for real? The idea of starting a colony on Mars in 10 years seems so out of this world that journalists
contacted one of the mission's potential suppliers to check on Mars One's credibility.
"I don't think they deserve to be dismissed," said a spokesman for an aerospace company
that contracted for NASA's current Mars mission. The spokesman did not want his company named because he didn't want to damage the company's relationship with Mars One, but he felt he should talk to CNN to help put the Dutch start-up into perspective for a news audience, he said.

With space opening up to the private sector, many companies large and small are trying to
get in on the game, he said. Mars One's idea is one of the most audacious ones. Strange, dangerous mission