by Herman Manson (@marklives) Mars One, project to establish a human colony on Mars, which will be funded through merchandise, sponsorships and possibly a reality TV show, has launched a global online campaign to find potential ‘astronauts’ willing to join the production/project. Video applications are lodged by the public along with an application fee. The public will be involved in voting for their favourite prospective ‘astronauts’ reports New Scientist.
The short film (see below) calling for formal applications, which has just been released, was produced by South African ‘high-concept’ creative agency Now&Partners who are also early investors in the project.
“The search for life on Mars begins on Earth,” the film made up of animated stills from previous NASA space missions, tells viewers. Beautifully produced and scripted it obviously tries to re-engage the human fascination with space and inter-planetary exploration.
“This online application will be the first of the four rounds that together make the Mars One selection procedure,” according to the Mars One site. “Round One will run for over five months and end on 31st August 2013. Applicants selected at the end of this round will include the first crew that will land on Mars in 2023. Mars One selection committees will hone the search for the first crew in three subsequent rounds and further training.”
While the project is attracting lots of media attention, often sceptical, in the last year Mars One had already received 10,000 messages from prospective applicants from over 100 countries.
MarkLives caught up with Writer & Director James Yeats Smith and Daniel Siegler, Managing Director of Now&Partners, to talk about the project.
Q: Pretty cool ad. Tell us about the concept?
James Yeats Smith (JYS): The approach we took in creating the piece is conveyed beautifully by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “If you want to build a ship, don’t gather people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
We wanted to create something emotionally rousing, something that would make the viewer feel united in mankind’s endeavour for greatness. To do this, we focussed on the ideology of space exploration, rather than the technical specifications of the mission.That being said, it was still important to contextualize the Mars mission by revisiting some of mankind’s past accomplishments as a means to ground the viewer’s belief in something real and tangible, before presenting the notion of a manned Mars mission.
Q: The film consists mostly of animated still images from the early NASA Gemini and Mercury missions. Fill us in on the production process.
Daniel Siegler (DS): The initial idea was to take a snapshot of a moment and expand it over time, exploring the idea of ‘making time’ if you will. We did a few screen tests initially and saw that it could be quite beautiful. Anwar Mcwhite, a single 2D Animator, who essentially created the entire animation of the film, did an unbelievable job.
JYS:It was challenging to find images and scenes that we all haven’t seen a milion times already, so we had to dig deep into the NASA archives to find photographs that excited us. Eventually, we found an amazing repository of high resolution Hasselblad scans of photographs taken by NASA astronauts and decided that we’d rather painstakingly animate and recreate those scenes than use recorded footage of rockets and spacewalks.
Q: Mars One seems silly but the ad was actually quite inspiring. We’ve forgotten to see a future beyond Earth as a crisp or one big terror target. That’s part of the intention here right?
JYS:The intention was definitely to stimulate a global debate about becoming an inter-planetary space faring species and depict a hopeful scenario that departs from the glum, oppressive representation we’ve become accustomed to in films and documentaries. I think, the only thing stopping us from realising this scenario is our belief that it’s possible.
Q: Having had a look at the Mars One website, and looking at the video applications coming in to be part of the mission to Mars, I noticed the applications are coming mostly from guys. How will you broaden this project’s appeal?
JYS:Thus far,human space flight has certainly favored men and there is real intent to make it more represenative of earth’s population, across all genders and races. As a result, we made the decision to feature a woman in the film seeing as we opted for male narration, so in the context of the film, we tried to strike an even balance between the two. Hopefully, women will find the project enticing enough to apply.
Q: Tell me more about the agency behind the ad.
DS:Now&Partners was founded in 2009 in Cape Town as an independent high-concept bureau dedicated to innovation in communication and the relationship between a truly exciting idea and its appropriate execution. We work between South Africa, Holland, Germany and the UK, depending on the project, and focus our thinking on products and ideas that are inspired by novel experiences and stories –giving us the reason for being, and working on projects like Mars One.
Q: And you guys are an early investor in Mars One – how did you find out about the project and why did you decide to invest time in it?
DS:James had been speaking with Mars One for a few months when he approached me with the project. I was immediately fascinated with the mission and idea, there was a level of disbelief which drew us both in I think – is this possible? We were fascinated with exploring space travel in terms of communication, story and concept and that was what really convinced us that we needed to do this.
Now&Partners invested in Mars One because it’s an audaciousand exciting endeavour and we’re very interested in the possibilites of the commercial space industry. We felt that if we could do a good job of getting people excited about going to Mars, we could get a return on our investment.
Q: Ethically, do you think it’s right to try and convince people to pay anywhere from US$5 – 75 to apply to be part of this mission?
JYS:Ultimately, a privately funded mission of this scale costs a lot of money. Considering that Mars One is blazing the trail by democratizing space travel, at least as far as allowing members of the international public to apply, a nominal application fee seems quite reasonable and separates the serious candidates from the charlatans or jokers.
Q: If not to Mars, where to from here?
JYS: All signs seem to indicate that space toursim will grow rapidly over the next decade, and the more it grows the more accesable it’ll become to the public. There is a lot of motivation to monetize human space flight when one considers companies like Virgin Galactic, with it’s orbital space flights, Golden Spike’s privatized lunar expeditions and the Russian company Orbital Technologies who aim to construct a space hotel in earth orbit, which is reminiscent of Elysium’s plot. So, it seems like ideas we’ve seen in science fiction are at the point where they are becoming reality.
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