Visitors to Mars Will Die in Under 68 Days

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 1:11PM EST · Published Apr 8, 9:10AM EDT

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Visitors to Mars Will Die in Under 68 Days — © Thinkstock

[cnxvideo id=”655413″ placement=”ros”]Both Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) and SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), are in a race to get humans into space, perhaps as far away as Mars. Each noted the dangers. One research project has laid them out in detail how visitors to Mars would die in 68 days or less.

Students from MIT published a paper in ScienceDirect. In their evaluation of the Mars One Ventures program they wrote:

The Mars One exploration and inhabitation of the Red Planet means to start in 2025 It will land four people on Mars every 26 months. The ships which carry them will only go one way.

One of the most important conclusions of the research is that neither crops nor oxygen generated for the inhabitants will be sufficient to support life for long. A fatal fire is also a major risk.

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The Daily Mail summarized the very long MIT paper:

Mars One is an ambitious plan by a Dutch entrepreneur to send people to Mars next decade and start building a colony there. The proposal has received fierce criticism for its lack of realistic goals, and now one study has dealt the team a crushing blow – by saying the colonists will begin dying in 68 days. Low air pressure, habitats at risk of explosion and a lack of spare parts are among the potentially fatal dangers that apparently await anyone who makes the inaugural trip.

Recently, Musk commented:

The risk of fatality will be high. There’s just no way around it.

That may be why there is no indication that Musk or Bezos plans to go.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.