UPDATE: No Return Trip to MARS

[wa3zrm]

Space Cadets line up for one-way Mars trip

More than 200,000 people from 140 countries have applied to go to Mars and never return, the group behind an ambitious venture to colonize the inhospitable red planet said Monday.
Bas Lansdorp, a Dutch engineer and entrepreneur, plans to establish a permanent base on Mars in a mission he hopes will take off in 2022 if he can find the necessary $6 billion.
One in four of the 202,586 applicants for the one-way trip are Americans, said Mars One, the non-profit group which initiated its hunt for "would-be Mars settlers" in April.
There are also hopefuls from India (10 percent), China (six percent) and Brazil (five percent), among other countries, it said.

(Excerpt) Read more at france24.com ...

[Darwin]

Not sure where Lansdorp is going to "find" six billion dollars. That's a very steep hill for what amounts to a glorified Kickstarter campaign. In addition the guy is hallucinating if he thinks such an enterprise can be carried off for a such a relatively paltry amount. He'd be lucky to get a quarter of the needed tonnage to orbit for six billion.

I'd be very surprised if it did not end up costing three or four times as much to get all the way there and establish a viable base camp even without the need to return crews to Earth. The cost of launching a ton to orbit would have to come down by around a factor of ten for six billion to be adequate funding for the entire mission. By the time costs come down that much, if they ever do, everyone who has already applied will likely be pushing up daisies.

[Jamison Zordan]

I think it is impossible to achieve.