WOMAN LEAVES HUSBAND AND KIDS FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY

COULD you watch your partner leave on a one-way ticket to Mars and be OK with it?
Could you support them knowing you’ll never see them again?
That’s exactly the dilemma facing Jason Stanford, whose wife Sonia Van Meter, 36, has been short-listed for the audacious Mars One mission, which aims to establish a permanent human settlement on the red planet. Out of 200,000 would-be
“Marsronauts”, she’s down to the final 100.

Incredibly, Mr Stanford, who is raising two sons with Ms Van Meter, is cool with it. He says his wife’s dream to help colonise Mars is bigger than him, bigger than their family and their future.
He’s resigned to the idea of letting her go, believing his family’s loss is humanity’s gain.
“The simple truth is that if he doesn’t want me to go, I won’t even consider it,” Ms Van Meter tells news.com.au from her home in Virginia, in the US.
“Just one word from him and I’d withdraw from the program without hesitation.”
But Mr Stanford says he would never stop her.
“What could be my personal horror story would become the world’s grandest adventure,” he wrote in a heartfelt essay, published Texas Monthly last week.
“Am I prepared to actually say goodbye? Am I prepared for the moment when I will be left standing on Earth with my face pointing up at a rapidly disappearing rocket carrying my partner away from me on a one-way trip to Mars?”
The answer is yes.

 

Sonia Van Meter, her husband and his two sons Henry, 13, and Hatcher, 11. Picture: Twitter Source: Supplied

Ms Van Meter has a one-in-four shot at joining 23 others — complete strangers until recently — on the Dutch nonprofit’s Mars One project which aims to establish a permanent colony on a planet no human being has ever stepped foot on.

It was a pipedream for the political consultant and suburban stepmother that has become very real, very fast.
What was initially “great cocktail chatter” turned serious when thousands of other candidates dropped away.
“As the deadline for announcing the final 100 approached, the Washington Post included Sonia in a feature on the local Mars One hopefuls,” Mr Stanford said.
“As I rode the train into work that morning, I saw dozens of people reading the article. I wanted to shout out with pride, ‘My wife is one of them!’ followed by ‘and I’m really not sure how I feel about this!’”

The mission, if all goes to plan, will leave Earth in 2026. That’s just 11 short years for the couple to cross everything off their bucket list and say their goodbyes.
It is a strange concept. Stranger still is the idea that Mr Stanford is behind her 100 per cent.
While at first Mr Stanford could “only see loss” in his wife’s decision, he quickly came around.
“Understanding how this might change my life forced me to realise that Mars One could change everyone’s life,” he wrote.
“If it succeeds in its mission — establishing a sustainable colony on another planet — it would change the history of humanity by expanding our boundaries beyond this planet.
“This was bigger than me.”

Then there’s the awkward, inevitable question: “Will she, you know, have to help populate the planet?”
“For the record, keeping adults alive on Mars will be enough of a challenge,” Mr Stanford says. “Human reproduction is not part of the mission.”

‘PEOPLE WILL START DYING WITHIN 68 DAYS’
Some say it is a suicide mission that simply can’t be achieved.
Mars is 55 million kilometres from Earth and would take a minimum of seven months to reach. Even if the colonists survived the journey, experts say they wouldn’t last long on the planet.
“The first crew fatality would occur approximately 68 days into the mission,” a report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found last year.
“Some form of oxygen removal system is required, a technology that has not yet been developed for space flight.”

Mars One co-founder and CEO, Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp plans to fund the audacious $4.5 billion project in part through a reality television program involving the participants. He has admitted the technology needed to keep humans alive on the red planet isn’t ready yet. But he says it is totally possible.

“While oxygen removal has never been done in space, I disagree that the technology is not mostly ready to go to Mars,” Mr Lansdorp told AFP. “Of course, the actual apparatus that we will take to Mars still needs to be designed and tested extensively, but the technology is already there.”
Adelaide-born astronaut Andy Thomas is leading a NASA team which is looking at how to send humans to Mars but says Mr Lansdorp’s plan is just not feasible.

“It’s raising interest in Mars, which is a good thing, and the ambition is there, but I’m sorry to see a lot of people committing resources to try and be a part of it,” he has said.
“There’s just no legitimacy to the engineering. It’s falsely raising the hopes of these young people wanting to be a part of it.”
Ms Van Meter applied for a spot on Mars One in 2013, but why?
“If humans look up from Earth and know there are human beings living on another planet, will we ever again be able to tell ourselves that there’s anything we can’t do?” she wrote in her application.
“If we can achieve that, then what else is possible?”

“My husband has been my greatest champion and loudest supporter since this whole adventure began,” she told news.com.au.
“I knew he was perfect for me when I married him, and every day we’ve been together since has proven me right. But loving him so much means that I can’t possibly do this without his blessing. I made a promise to him the day we married, and I intend to keep that promise no matter what planet I’m on.”

Telling people what she plans to do with the rest of her life if accepted on Mars One draws mixed reactions from people.
“‘How can you leave forever?’ ‘What does your family think about this?’ ‘Your husband’s okay with you leaving him?’ These are the questions I’m peppered with when I tell people this is a one-way trip. And these are reasonable questions, perfectly understandable, and they deserve well-considered answers,” she told Time magazine recently.

“My father and sister think I’m a little nuts, but they know my reasons for doing this are about furthering a dream for mankind, not making a name for myself.
“Now that I’m one of one hundred, the world is watching, looking to me for answers to questions that were easily brushed off when this was all just a fantastical daydream.”
She says the “hard questions” visit her at night.

“It’s one thing to imagine the good that can come from a manned mission to Mars, but it’s quite another to tally up the cost and see one’s life on the bill.
“Paradoxically, I couldn’t even be contemplating this without the support of my family. My stepsons think it’s neat that their stepmom wants to fly off into space, even if it means I might not be around to see grandchildren.”