NASA: Mars Mission A One-Way Trip

Caelum et terra transibunt, verba vero mea non praeteribunt. (Matthew 24:35)

News.com.au reports NASA is looking for volunteers to fly to Mars - the snag is that you won't come back.

NASA revealed that it had already received more than $1 million to commence work on the project at its Ames Research Center in California.

Center director Pete Worden, who claimed humans could be living on Mars by 2030 despite the inhospitable conditions, said: "The human space program is now aimed at settling other worlds".

Worden added: "Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars or get fired".

The price of sending 20 Mars settlers with a one-way ticket would be equal to bringing four astronauts back.

Experts say a nuclear-fueled rocket could make the journey in four months.

Of all the planets in the solar system, Mars is the most likely to have substantial quantities of water, making it the best bet for sustaining life.

Worden suggested that new technologies, such as synthetic biology and alterations to the human genome, could be explored ahead of the mission.

Writing in the Journal of Cosmology, scientists Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies envisaged sending four volunteer astronauts on the first mission to colonize Mars.

A one-way human mission to Mars would not be a fixed-duration project as in the Apollo program, but the first step in establishing a permanent human presence on the planet, they said.

We need to colonize Mars, because we are in a desperate race against disaster.

Our Lord Jesus Christ has furthermore promised us victory and we know that "with God nothing shall be impossible", see Luke 1:37.

"Et vidi caelum novum et terram novam; primum enim caelum et prima terra abiit, et mare iam non est", Revelation 21:1.