Against Martian reservations

NASA is advertising a job of a lifetime. Or more accurately: a job for life. Or much more accurately: the job of life. On the planet Mars.

NASA believes that it is now technically possible to send a group of people to effectively colonise Mars.

The 9 month trip is a one way ticket affair, however, as a return journey would be both prohibitive in cost and complexity to undertake. The Mars colony will instead be expected to survive and grow in relative independence and be maintained through regularly dispatched deliveries of provisions. Such as, I would assume, air.

All this, of course, opens up two polar lines of thought. One - of human existence beyond Earth, where the potential to expand the reasoning and the infinite beauty of our position in the universe can finally begin to be fulfilled. And the other - The alien quadrilogy. Yes, wicked Martians, malevolent computers and the wrathful Khan are all conjured up when thinking about branching out into living on other planets.

But what the outcome to the manned Mars mission will be, to my mind, lies somewhere nearer in-between Lost in Space and Capricorn One. Financial cut backs.

Even if it gets the all systems go [that's a NASA analogy there] I can see NASA quickly outsourcing the rockets fired to Mars stuffed with the air and magazine subscriptions. Times are hard for NASA. And once the colonists are launched the euphoria will likely dissipate as quickly as the plume from their shuttle thanks to our generation Y lifestyles, so who will notice a couple of corners cut? Apart from the Mars Colonists. And they won’t really get a say. They are glorified dog cosmonauts – we have to send them air in rockets, for heaven’s sake.

The hippies will stop protesting in their tie-die fashions and no longer hold hands around the launch site and run out of daffodils to stick into the exhausts of the booster packs. Songs with the words “Mars” “Spaceman” and “Stars” in the lyrics will swiftly fall of the Radio playlists. It will still be pretty exciting for the colonists, don’t get me wrong there. Those guys will still be still very excited for most of this, I am sure. I mean - come on! MARS! But for the people back on Earth the Mars colony after a month or two of them landing will be nothing but a no longer clicked internet bookmark for a sponsored Mars bio-sphere webcam site when it becomes all too apparent an ancient alien race are not about to hunt the colonists as game.

I wouldn't be surprised if NASA outsourced to Parcel Force: A Mars colonist finding a Failed Delivery card behind the bio-sphere air lock. The little scientist shaking his fist into the web-cam, “I was waiting in for it all day! You all saw!”

But no one did.

So yeah, good luck getting your air supplies, space losers.