Chinese scientist who prepared to spend his life on Mars determined shattered dream will still be reality
- Li Dapeng volunteered for mission of no return to red planet and the collapse of Mars One, the company behind it, has done nothing to put men and women like him off
The news broke in China around Valentine’s Day. At noon, while browsing the internet, Li Dapeng read an article headlined: “Mars One bankrupt: Four Chinese’ dream of Mars migration shattered”.
He scanned the story, then chuckled to himself. He had prepared for this for a while. “We received an update about every one or two months, and for the past couple of years it has always been unable to raise large amounts of funds,” Li said.
The 37-year-old, from Handan, Hebei province, was one of four Chinese from 100 candidates globally chosen to be part of “it” – the Mars migration project announced by Mars One, a small private Dutch company, in 2012.
The project proposed to send volunteers on a one-way mission to Mars in 2023 to begin a colonisation process. These volunteers would be resupplied by cargo missions from Earth and would live out their lives on the red planet.
In 2015, after rounds of applications and a selection process, the final 100 volunteers were chosen. Four were from China or of Chinese descent, including Li.
The project met with media scepticism and criticism from scientists. A 2014 report from Massachusetts Institute of Technology assessed the project’s feasibility and warned that if the habitats failed, the settlers would be dead within 10 weeks of arriving on Mars.