I stumbled across this interesting web site about a manned missions to Mars by the year 2023.  It’s www.mars-one.com.  The specifics of their plan are limited in scope, so it is difficult to evaluate how realistic their proposal is (or, alternatively, that makes it very easy to evaluate how realistic their proposal is).

The thing that made me doubt them the most was the image on their timeline for the year 2018 where they claim that:

In 2018 a robotic exploration vehicle will land on Mars to join the supply Lander. This rover’s task is to travel around the planet to determine the most favorable location for the settlement. As always, you will be able to join it on its mission thanks to the live video being streamed back to Earth!

Maybe the Mars One team is dumbing things down for us to make it simple, but there is no way that anyone sensible will send a rover to “travel around the planet” to determine the best spot for the settlement.  I would hope that they would select a spot first and use a rover only to do the very last scouting of the area in order to make sure that there were no unforeseen problems with that location.

The Mars Exploration Rovers were supposed to only travel 40  meters in a day with a total range of only one kilometer.  As of January 2009, the two rovers had traveled more than a combined 21 kilometers.

Answers to the FAQs are also extremely simple.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on this group though, and to see if they get any further traction towards their stated goal.  They claim that they want to make this a very social project, and in fact, one of their purported supporters (“ambassadors” on the website) is none other than Big Brother co-creator Paul Römer.  Wait a second… maybe this is a hoax after all…