Four UK women and a man among 100 candidates selected for Mars One project

Four women and a man from the UK are among the final 100 candidates for the Mars One Project, which envisages establishment of a permanent human settlement on the planet by 2024, www.shropshirestar.com reported.

The controversial privately-funded mission received over 200,000 applications. According to organisers' estimates, the project would cost $6 billion dollars and was set to be filmed for a reality television series.

Twenty-three-year old, Hannah Earnshaw, doing PhD in astronomy at Durham is among the UK hopefuls, who include students and researchers in physics and astrophysics, a science lab technician as also a manager for Virgin Media.

She said, human space exploration had always interested her so the opportunity to be one of the people involved was really appealing. The future of humanity was in space, she added.

She said her family was pretty thrilled and were really happy for her. Obviously it was going to be challenging, leaving earth and not returning, she noted.

She would now be tested in groups on her response to stressful situations before finding out at the end of the year if she had made the list of 24 people chosen for the mission. There would then be eight or nine unmanned trips to Mars before the first group of four astronauts was launched into space in 2024.

Meanwhile, www.nzherald.co.nz reported another of the 100 volunteers short listed for the mission, Maggie Lieu said she found out at 6 am that she had made the final 100.

Along with 50 men and 49 other women, she had been selected to spend the next decade learning everything she needed to know to live on the Red Planet as part of the Mars One project.

If her training was successful, it would all be broadcast on reality television around the world to fund the mission, she could make the team of 40 chosen to leave earth. The first spacecraft, with two men and two women on board would depart in 2024.

The other UK citizens are Ryan MacDonald, 21, an Oxford University student; Alison Rigby, 35, a science laboratory technician and Clare Weedon, 27, a systems integration manager.

With nothing to build on but dusty rock and craters, the astronauts would need to become self-sufficient, building everything themselves and taking all the food and oxygen they would need to keep them going in the meantime, which called for 10 years of learning everything from plumbing to medical care.