--- title: Mars Colonists Would Die Within 68 Days, MIT Paper Suggests description: A new analysis of Mars One's plans to colonize the Red Planet finds that the explorers would begin dying within 68 days of touching down canonical: https://time.com/3502724/mars-one-colony-mit-bas-landsdorp/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-10-13T21:01:24.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:44:24.755Z article:section: Science og:title: Mars Colonists Would Die Within 68 Days, MIT Paper Suggests og:description: A new analysis of Mars One's plans to colonize the Red Planet finds that the explorers would begin dying within 68 days of touching down og:url: https://time.com/3502724/mars-one-colony-mit-bas-landsdorp/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltdda7362809317010/6987608006f2c1ba3433157b/mars.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: Mars og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Mars Colonists Would Die Within 68 Days, MIT Paper Suggests twitter:description: A new analysis of Mars One's plans to colonize the Red Planet finds that the explorers would begin dying within 68 days of touching down twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltdda7362809317010/6987608006f2c1ba3433157b/mars.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Think You Could Live on Mars? Think Again > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Future Proof: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Future Proof is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. Making sense of the climate and energy economy. Future Proof examines the forces transforming energy and climate, and what those changes mean for business, technology, policy and the global economy. Senior correspondent Justin Worland goes beyond traditional climate coverage to connect the energy transition to the bigger decisions reshaping companies, markets and society. 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Future Proof is TIME's weekly climate and energy newsletter, written by senior correspondent Justin Worland. It connects the energy transition to the decisions reshaping business, technology, policy and markets. #### Where can I follow the energy transition as a business story? Future Proof covers climate and energy as an economic and business story rather than only an environmental one. It publishes every Friday and is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who writes Future Proof? Justin Worland, a senior correspondent at TIME and an award-winning climate journalist, writes Future Proof. #### Is Future Proof free? Yes. Future Proof is free at time.com/newsletters. ## Video: Was There Water On Mars? [Watch (HLS stream): Was There Water On Mars?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/D2PMM67Z.m3u8) (2:12)  _Published 2013-11-16. Why did Mars lose its atmosphere and almost all of its water 3.7 billion years ago? The MAVEN spacecraft may bring us answers._  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Oct 13, 2014 9:01 PM UTC  Mars Mars Getty Images  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Oct 13, 2014 9:01 PM UTC Hear that? That’s the sound of 200,000 reservations being reconsidered. Two hundred thousand is the announced number of intrepid folks [who signed up last year](http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/09/11/200000-apply-for-one-way-trip-to-mars/) for the chance to be among the first Earthlings to colonize Mars, with flights beginning as early as 2024\. The catch: the trips will be one way, as in no return ticket, as in farewell friends, family, charbroiled steaks and vodka martinis, to say nothing of such everyday luxuries as modern hospitals and, you know, breathable air. But the settlers in Jamestown weren’t exactly volunteering for a weekend in Aspen either, and in both cases, the compensations—being the first people on a distant shore—seemed attractive enough. Now, however, the Mars plan seems to have run into a teensy snag. According to [a new analysis by a team of grad students at MIT](http://web.mit.edu/sydneydo/Public/Mars%20One%20Feasibility%20Analysis%20IAC14.pdf), the new arrivals would begin dying within just 68 days of touching down. ### Journey to the Red Planet: MAVEN Approaches Martian Orbit  An artist concept of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission. Launched in November 2013, the mission will explore the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the sun and solar wind. Lockheed Martin/NASA  The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft launches from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 41, Monday, Nov. 18, 2013, Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA’s Mars-bound spacecraft, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls) Bill Ingalls—NASA  NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, inside a payload fairing, is hoisted to the top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41 on Nov. 8, 2013. Kim Shiflett—NASA  Inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, engineers and technicians perform a spin test of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft. The operation is designed to verify that MAVEN is properly balanced as it spins during the initial mission activities. Kim Shiflett—NASA  Engineers and technicians test deploy the twin solar arrays on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sept. 23, 2013. Kim Shiflett—NASA  Technicians install the parabolic high gain antenna onto the MAVEN spacecraft in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility on Aug. 9, 2013\. The antenna will communicate vast amounts of data to Earth during the mission. Jim Grossmann—NASA  A crane lifts the MAVEN spacecraft inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility on Aug. 3, 2013\. The spacecraft was flown to Kennedy Space Center for launch processing from Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado near the Lockheed Martin facility in Littleton, Colo. Tim Jacobs—NASA  An engineer positions a sling on the MAVEN spacecraft inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility. MAVEN will be prepared inside the facility for its scheduled November launch to Mars. Tim Jacobs—NASA The organizers of the burn-your-boats expedition is a group called [Mars One](http://www.mars-one.com/), headed by Bas Lansdorp, a Dutch entrepreneur and mechanical engineer. As Lansdorp sees things, habitat modules and other hardware would be sent to the Red Planet in advance of any astronauts, who would arrive in four-person crews at two-year intervals—when Mars and Earth make their closest approach, which holds the outbound journey to a brief (relatively speaking) eight months. The crew-selection process would be part of (yes) a sponsored reality show, which would ensure a steady flow of cash—and since the settlers would grow their own food onsite, there would be little to carry along with them. All that would keep the overall cost of the project to a shoestring (relative again) $6 billion. So what could go wrong? That’s what the four MIT students set out to find out, and the short answer is: a lot. The biggest problem, the students discovered, concerns that business of breathable air. One of the things that’s always made Earth such a niftily habitable place to live is that what animals exhale, plants inhale, and vice versa. Since the Martian astronauts and their crops would be living and respiring in the same enclosed habitats, a perfect closed loop should result in which we provide them all the carbon dioxide they need and they return the favor with oxygen. Only it doesn’t, the MIT students found. The problem begins with the lettuce and the wheat, both of which are considered essential crops. As lettuce matures, peaking about 30 days after planting, it pushes the 02 level past what’s known as .3 molar fractions, which, whatever it means, doesn’t sound terribly dangerous — except it’s also the point at which the threat of fire rises to unacceptable levels. That risk begins to tail off as the crop is harvested and eaten, but it explodes upward again, far past the .3 level, at 68 days when the far gassier wheat matures. A simple answer would be simply to vent a little of the excess O2 out, which actually could work, except the venting apparatus is not able to distinguish one gas from another. That means that nitrogen—which would, as on Earth, make up the majority of the astronauts’ atmosphere—would be lost too. That, in turn, would lower the internal pressure to unsurvivable levels—and that’s what gets your 68-day doomsday clock ticking. There is some question too about whether the hardware that Mars One is counting on would even be ready for prime time. The mission planners make much of the fact that a lot of what they’re planning to use on Mars has already been proven aboard the International Space Station (ISS), which is true enough. But that hardware is built to operate in microgravity—effectively zero g—while Mars’s gravity is nearly 40% of Earth’s. So a mechanical component that would weigh 10 lbs. on Earth can be designed with little concern about certain kinds of wear since it would weigh 0 lbs. in orbit. But on Mars it would be 4 lbs., and that can make all the difference. “The introduction of a partial gravity environment,” the grad students write, “will inevitably lead to different \[environmental\] technologies.” For that and other reasons, technical breakdowns are a certainty. The need for replacement parts is factored into Mars One’s plans, but probably not in the way that they should be. According to the MIT team, over the course of 130 months, spare parts alone would gobble up 62% of the payload space on resupply missions, making it harder to get such essentials as seeds, clothes and medicine—to say nothing of other crew members—launched on schedule. Then too, there is the question of habitat crowding. It’s easy to keep people alive if you feed them, say, a single calorie-dense food product every day. But energy bars forever means quickly losing your marbles, which is why Mars One plans for a variety of crops—just not a big enough variety. “Given that the crop selection will significantly influence the wellbeing of the crew for the entirety of their lives after reaching Mars,” the authors write, “we opt for crop variety over minimizing growth area.” Then there is the question of cost—there’s not a space program in history whose initial price tag wasn’t badly lowballed—to say nothing of maintaining that biennial launch schedule, to say nothing of the cabin fever that could soon enough set the settlers at one another’s throats. Jamestown may not have been a picnic, but when things got to be too much you could always go for a walk by the creek. No creeks here, nor much of anything else either. Human beings may indeed colonize Mars one day, and it’s a very worthy goal. But as with any other kind of travel, the best part of going is often coming home. _Read next:_ [_20 Breathtaking Images Of The Earth As Seen From Space_](http://time.com/11534/20-breathtaking-images-of-the-earth-as-seen-from-space/?xid=time%5Freadnext) ## Transcript [ MUSIC ]. Earth and Mars are both about 4. 5 billion years old, and both began as wet, even waterlogged places. But about 3. 7 billion years ago, Mars lost its atmosphere and when that happened it lost almost all of its water. The question is why and the answer may come from the MAVEN spacecraft, which NASA plans to launch on November 18th. [ MUSIC ]. Mars may have lost its atmosphere in several ways. The planet is not only smaller, but also less dense than Earth and as a result has only about 38 % of Earth's gravity. That makes it hard to hold on to air. Life may still have taken hold, at least in microbial form during the early years of Mars' existence, because life on earth is thought to have begun about 800 million years after its formation. At that point in Mars' history. It was still warm and wet. Some of the upper reaches of Mars' atmosphere could simply have frittered away into space. And great gusts of it could have been lost early in the planet's life during what's known as the Great Heavy Bombardment period. But Mars' atmosphere was subjected to a more insidious force as well. The solar wind, the stream of charged particles that gush forth from the sun, would have interacted with the atmosphere and stripped much of it away through an entirely different process. Earth feels the solar wind too, but we have a magnetic field. Mars once had a weaker one, and even that eventually faded. [ MUSIC ] The MAVEN spacecraft will fly an elliptical orbit around Mars. Sometimes dipping as low as 77 miles. And sometimes as high as about 3, 800 miles. That will allow it to get both a big picture look at the planet, and also an up- close sampling of its atmosphere. [ MUSIC ] ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3502724/mars-one-colony-mit-bas-landsdorp/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3502724/mars-one-colony-mit-bas-landsdorp/"},"headline":"Think You Could Live on Mars? 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