What Happens When Space Travel And Reality TV Collide?

In April last year, the Mars One program put out an open call for people who wish to die alone on a cold rock far from their family. Over 200,000 hopefuls applied. The application process has recently passed the second round, meaning there are still 1,058 people in the race to be the first person on Mars, while the rest have to die on Earth like chumps.

For those of us who missed the initial call-out, Mars One is an independently produced and funded program to create the first human colony on Mars. The plan is to fund the trip through a combination of wealthy donors, crowd-sourced funding and a reality television show, which will follow the lives of the first human beings to land on Mars.

While the idea of taking a reality television show winner and blasting them into the cold darkness of space seems utterly fantastic, it’s worth considering that this show will almost certainly be entirely terrible — and not just because it will have thoroughly jumped the shark during its first episode.

Imagine, for instance, if modern television had been given the opportunity to cover the moon landing. There would have been rolling coverage of every aspect of the journey, from the Red Bull Landing Module to the ten best Pepsi Max Auxiliary Rocket Firings. We would have heard from Neil Armstrong’s family, friends, teachers, barber and postman. We’d know all about his third-cousin who works in the sex industry, and his local priest’s controversial views on GM foods.

Likewise, any modern mission will saturate modern news cycles to the point of fatigue, which makes it hard to imagine the Mars landing uniting people like the Moon Landing did. No one wants to see the first person step on a foreign planet above a scrolling bar of tweets all utilising the hashtag #MarsOneSmallStep.

It’s also worth questioning how Mars One will decide who get to be the first people to set foot on Mars.

We were blessed to have Neil Armstrong as the first man on the moon. He was humble and modest and shied away from the camera. Everyone on Earth knew his name, yet he never tried to sell a novelty record, and never appeared in a series of commercials for the Hungry Jacks Double Whopper(“It’s Out of this World!”) The people behind Mars One have different priorities. Ultimately they’re making a television show, and there’s nothing fun and dramatic about the stoic ambassador type. At the very least, Mars One is a one-way journey: What kind of person would they want to instil such an honour upon? What kind of people would we want to shoot into space?

As a guide rule for space travel, it would be nice for humanity to live in such a way that, if the Vulcans were to show up, we wouldn’t be horribly embarrassed. With this as our aim, it would be difficult to find a worse choice to make first contact than a reality show contestant.

And after we’ve picked them, what next? With the precedent set for space exploration as entertainment once Mars is conquered, season two will have to up the stakes. Perhaps we’ll be treated to Celebrity Mars One, in which Donald Trump and a runner-up from Masterchef are blasted into the sun just because that sounds great.

Which brings us to the biggest issue here: the very real possibility that people could die before they get there.

The road to Apollo 11 was paved with disaster, and there’s every chance Mars One will be too. German astronaut Ulrich Walter has already rated the chances of Mars One astronauts reaching the red planet and surviving for more than three months as less than 20%. While this is certainly a concern for the Mars One production crew, it’s hard to imagine it’s a complete deterrent. Who wouldn’t want to watch a show where there was a genuine possibility that at any moment the entire cast could explode? That’s fifth season Breaking Bad tension.

I’m not saying that this show won’t be great. If the season finale ended with two people in a module (the others having presumably been ejected into the dark of space following their eviction) and an SMS vote to see who gets to step on the surface first, I’d watch it. The issue is whether space travel should be kept as something sacred — particularly at these opening moments, before commercial space travel is an actual viable option. We’re in the pioneer phase of space exploration, and it’s still possible to dictate how it might look in the future.

It’s still not clear whether this trip will go ahead at all. The mission is yet to reach the halfway point of its funding target on the Mars One IndieGogo campaign, with only 18 days to go (although, they do keep extending it). The primary funding platform, the reality television program, is yet to be sold, and it may prove difficult to find a network willing to fill out such hefty OH&S forms.

But with NASA’s lack of funding and seeming disinterest in re-entering a space race with China, it’s possible that these third-party private space travel ventures could be the only way we get to see a person on Mars in our lifetime. There’s even the small possibility that programs like this could be what reinvigorates our fascination with space.

But there’s an equal chance that this will be what makes our species decide we aren’t fit to spread throughout the galaxy.

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James Colley is a writer/comedian from Western Sydney. He blogs at fineanimalgorilla.com and tweets at @JamColley.