MIT says Mars One Mission still not a feasible idea

A study by a team in MIT that assessed the Mars One mission to check its feasibility said that presently the technologies there do not support the idea.

The MIT researchers, Sydney Do and Oliver de Weck, developed a detailed settlement-analysis tool to assess the feasibility of the Mars One mission, and found that new technologies will be needed to keep humans alive on Mars.

According to the mission, four astronauts will be sent to Mars to start building the first sustainable settlement. But growing crops as food, 'baking ice' for water and rise of unsafe levels of oxygen are still unprecedented.

The study revealed that food obtainment from locally grown crops, would produce unsafe levels of oxygen, which would set off a series of events that would eventually cause human inhabitants to suffocate and introduction of nitrogen to reduce the oxygen level would deplete nitrogen tanks, leaving the habitat without a gas to compensate for leaks.

To avoid this scenario, a system to remove excess oxygen would have to be implemented - a technology that has not yet been developed for use in space.

Analysis on the basis of the Mars Phoenix Lander suggested that current technologies designed to "bake" water from soil are not yet ready for deployment, particularly in space.

The team also performed an integrated analysis of spare-parts resupply and the researchers found that as the colony grows, spare parts would quickly dominate future deliveries to Mars, making up as much as 62 percent of payloads from Earth.

The researchers said that if one wants a spare part on Mars, they would have to send it when a launch window is open, every 26 months, and then wait 180 days for it to get there. 3-D printers will have to improve by leaps. If spares are made in-situ, that would be a massive savings.

As for the actual voyage to Mars, the team also calculated the number of rockets required, would be 15 Falcon Heavy rockets to establish the first four settlers and subsequent crews on the planet instead of 6 previously determined.

The transportation cost for this leg of the mission alone, combined with the astronauts' launch, would be 4.5 billion dollars- a cost that would grow with additional crews and supplies to Mars. As the team found, spare parts, over time, would substantially inflate the cost of initial and future missions to Mars.

The Dutch nonprofit that led the Mars One mission suggested that the first human colony can start living there by 2025 and work is being put together for the same from now.