BAS LANSDORP gazed in awe at the landscape of Mars. NASA's latest mission had revealed a blood-red world scattered with boulders, dunes sculpted by ferocious winds and hills beckoning on the horizon. "The images of Sojourner on TV inspired me," he recalls. "I thought: 'I want to go there'."
There was one big problem. NASA had calculated the cost of a human mission to Mars at $500 billion – clearly a non-starter for a NASA astronaut, let alone a private citizen.
That was in 1997, when Lansdorp was an engineering student at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Fast-forward 16 years and the world of Mars exploration has been turned on its head. The first people to reach the Red Planet may not be astronauts from a government space agency, but private individuals. Two companies – Mars One, which is headed by Lansdorp, and Inspiration Mars – ...
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