Imagine never to feel fresh air again on your face, never to be warmed by sun’s life-giving rays, never to hear an orchestra play, never to feel whiskey sink warm into your chest. No more walking on grass in bare feet, inhaling the scent of the air after a storm, watching kids play elaborate games in their secret worlds. No leisure time. No loved ones. No hope of release. No freedom to roam. No variation in a practically tasteless diet. No sex with the person you deeply love. Cramped quarters. Limited showers. An unrelenting work schedule. Darkness. Isolation. An ineffective sleep schedule. Constant fear, chronic stress, and hyper-vigilance. The ever-present threat of death.

It occurred as I walked on the beach with Josh and asked him what his last meal on Earth would be (“Bacon and eggs! I would miss that, actually”), that the truest analogy for a one-way trip to Mars is not a simulation in the Arctic or on an isolated Hawaiian island; it’s not 500 days in a frozen desert underground or at the bottom of the sea, knowing that eventually you’ll be back on terra firma with the people you love. What it would really be like is being sentenced to death row.

One night I have a nightmare so vivid I still feel panicked to recall it all these months later. In the dream I’d gone to meet Josh at a huge hangar where the Mars One craft resided, and he was very excited to give me a tour of the ship. I followed him dutifully onboard and took vague notice of three other people in space suits. Hours seemed to pass in involved conversation until eventually I looked out the tiny round window and horrifyingly saw we were in the depths of black space. “Oh, yeah,” Josh said. “I meant to tell you that takeoff was today! Sorry. So you’re here with us now.” Panic crushed against my windpipe and I felt an object of incredible heft pressing down on my chest.

I woke up gulping a lungful of air. For months, a tiny bird with a skull no bigger than a walnut had taken up residence directly outside the window, and every day it filled the early morning with its unfathomably loud song. Sometimes I could hear the bird three rooms away while music played in the house. It refused entreaties of birdseed to lure it further down the garden. It was incredibly irritating, but at that moment it was the sweetest sound I might have ever heard. I threw open the window and inhaled the cold morning air and the scent of the honeydew flowers and looked at the endless blue of sky where the crescent moon was faintly visible and just to be certain, reached out and touched the rough bark of the tree’s sturdy trunk.

I am in no way made of the right stuff.

Eventually I am able to speak with the public face of Mars One, co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp. We connect as he is waiting to catch a plane back to the Netherlands. “I’ll try to keep my voice down a bit,” he says.

Lansdorp’s background is in wind energy, but he now bills his professional areas of expertise as “entrepreneurship, public speaking, start-ups.” I ask why for him Mars One’s mission is something so important to achieve, even though he has said many times that he personally would not want to ever go to the planet himself.

“For the world at the moment a mission to Mars is exactly what we need. I think it can give us a common goal, something to aspire to together, something to work on together, something to unite us. Getting young kids excited about space exploration, having astronauts as heroes instead of pop stars. But I think the bigger picture of having a common goal, a dot on the horizon, that’s the most important thing.”

Global unity is the goal? I ask.

Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp (Mars One)

“To be honest, for me it’s not an important part of the program. For me it’s just about the goal of getting this done,” he says, confusingly. “For me personally it’s really about building the next base for humans to go to. For me it’s more the technology challenge and the building challenge than the actual big picture.”

I ask how he sees Mars One being able to get a mission to launch for such a comparatively small budget compared with NASA’s proposals for a manned return mission.

“That’s a question I get a lot, as you can imagine. There’s a few different factors. First, Mars One is a private organization. We have no political obligations, which means we can just find the best supplier for the best price. In NASA they have a problem where if they do a mission like the Curiosity Rover, each component has to come from different states because each state contributes to NASA and they want their money back, basically. Mars One doesn’t have that problem.”

(NASA’s David Willson said, “No, I don’t think this is correct. Choosing vendors is a very serious business, and NASA—and the U.S. government—does not want to be seen favoring anyone. Competitive selection is based on many factors as well as cost.”)

“Another reason is that the space agencies have become too much risk-averse, which is extremely expensive. It’s not at all allowed for anything to go wrong, which takes a lot of paperwork to ensure. While we think having a little bit higher risk with the mission is very acceptable and is something that will reduce costs significantly.”

This makes Mars One sound like some kind of intergalactic Uber. If checks and balances are too expensive, just do away with them in private enterprise. If people might die in the course of your mission, just have them sign a waiver. Neither NASA nor the European Space Agency nor the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency nor any government body can deliberately allow its citizens to die in space, and they certainly can’t send them one-way with no way to retrieve them.

Mars One lists SpaceX on its suppliers page, but SpaceX has no current contracts with Mars One and said as much over email, adding that the company is always open to future contracts from all interested parties. The contracts Mars One does have are with Lockheed Martin, which is undertaking a feasibility study for an unmanned craft which is based on their 2008 unmanned Phoenix Lander mission, but which can’t be completed until it receives the payload specifications from Mars One — specifications that Mars One recently put out a call to universities to provide. Lockheed Martin confirmed that this contract is under way and that it is waiting to receive the payload specs. The lander is slated to fly, according to Mars One, in 2018. There is also a suit concept study under way—the first step in developing an eventual prototype for what the colonists would spend their time outside wearing—with Paragon Space Development Corporation. A representative of Paragon responded to queries over email, “We appreciate the challenging work Mars One have contracted Paragon to perform, and we look forward to a long and growing working relationship as the cadence of their program advances.”

A SpaceX Falcon launch (Reuters/NASA)

Another contract Mars One has in place is with a company owned by Endemol, which produced Big Brother. The two companies announced the deal in a joint press release, but when asked for comment Endemol wouldn’t confirm if or not the production is for a pilot or for a fully commissioned series, their PR director writing, “Things are at a very early stage and we’re not yet in a position to add anything further to what was detailed in the press release.”

A reality television series is the lynchpin of Mars One’s plan. It is through this that it intends to raise the necessary capital to actually fund the mission via advertising revenue and broadcast rights. The proposal is to film the final candidates 24/7 for the duration of their 10-year training mission on Earth, from the selection process to liftoff, and then to continue to broadcast the mission itself, live, beamed in perpetuity back from Mars to viewers on Earth.

There is currently no network buyer for the show.

For the rights to advertise and screen this Survivor in space, Mars One estimates revenues of upwards of $8 billion, basing its estimates on the most recent Olympic Games cycle’s revenues. With this money, Mars One will then be able to purchase the spacefaring technologies that, in 10 years’ time, companies like SpaceX will have perfected, ready to send the Mars One astronauts on their journey. There is the small problem of not having the money until you have the show and not having the show until you have the technology and not having the technology until you have the money and possibly not having the technology in time, or ever, which is why, Mars One says on its website, the schedule is flexible.

Corporate space missions have appeared before in fiction and film many times. They have also appeared in a version suspiciously close to what Mars One is proposing in The Journal of Cosmology, a controversial online journal edited by Rhawn Joseph. Joseph is probably best known for filing a lawsuit against NASA, for allegedly failing to adequately investigate an object on the surface of Mars discovered by the Curiosity rover. He contended that the object could have been a living organism. It turned out to be a rock. (He also writes a great deal about human sexuality, but you probably missed his paper “Sexual Consciousness: The Evolution of Breasts, Buttocks and the Big Brain.”)

In 2010, Joseph wrote “Marketing Mars: Financing the Human Mission to Mars and the Colonization of the Red Planet.” The biggest revenue stream in his plan is a reality TV series that would film every minute of the training and mission and send it out to the world. A combination of the Super Bowl, the Olympic Games, the NBA, Star Wars, Big Brother, American Idol, and Survivor, mixed with a little Running Man. Reading his plan, I began to wonder if viewers would place bets on the lives of the astronauts: Will they survive entry to the surface? Who will suffer a psychotic break and turn on their fellows? They have run out of food, how many days will they last? The oxygen recycle system is broken, can they repair it before they asphyxiate?

Joseph claims that the company stole his Mars financing plan, and says his intellectual property is being used to fleece vulnerable people out of their money, “By charging ‘suckers’ $40.00 to apply for the chance to be part of a one way mission to Mars when in fact Mars One is nothing more than a website,” he writes. Lansdorp denies that Mars One took the idea from Joseph, and says that Mary Roach’s 2010 book Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void was their actual inspiration.

Joseph resisted requests to interview him in person in California, but emailed, “Fraudsters like Mars One emerge from beneath rocks all the time. That’s just the way it is. And you can quote me.”

Commander Chris Hadfield is known to you, depending on your level of obsession with astronauts, either as the guy on the International Space Station who went viral singing David Bowie, or as the guy who heroically survived going blind on a space walk on the station when tiny drops of chemicals from a puncture in his suit lining made their way into both his eyes. “There’s a great, I don’t know, self-defeating optimism in the way that this project has been set up,” he says, over the phone. He speaks in the manner of someone breezily adept at explaining complex ideas and who is clearly delighted to be doing so. “I fear that it’s going to be a little disillusioning for people, because it’s presented as if for sure it’s going to happen. They’re choosing crews. And so all those people are therefore rightfully excited.”

“Going to Mars is hard,” Hadfield adds. “As John Young, one of the most accomplished astronauts in history, said, ‘Mars is a lot further away than almost everybody thinks. Both physically and in time.’”

Astronaut Chris Hadfield (Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images)

Hadfield says that Mars One fails at even the most basic starting point of any manned space mission: If there are no specifications for the craft that will carry the crew, if you don’t know the very dimensions of the capsule they will be traveling in, you can’t begin to select the people who will be living and working inside of it.

“I really counsel every single one of the people who is interested in Mars One, whenever they ask me about it, to start asking the hard questions now. I want to see the technical specifications of the vehicle that is orbiting Earth. I want to know: How does a space suit on Mars work? Show me how it is pressurized, and how it is cooled. What’s the glove design? None of that stuff can be bought off the rack. It does not exist. You can’t just go to SpaceMart and buy those things.”

Hadfield vividly remembers being nine years old and watching the television with his parents as Neil Armstrong stepped off the Apollo lander and from then on fine-tuning every aspect of his life to maximize his chances of one day going into space—which he achieved after 26 years of work and training. He is not someone in the habit of crushing people’s dreams.

“Thirteen years ago we started living on the space station, so when we left Earth, we basically started colonizing space as a planet. And then the next steps out were the moon, asteroids, and then eventually Mars. We absolutely need to do it on the moon for a few generations, learn how to do all of those things — how do you completely recycle your water? How do you completely recycle your oxygen system? How do you protect yourselves from radiation? How do you not go crazy? How do you set up the politics of the place and the command structure, so that when we get it wrong we won’t all die? How do we figure all that out?

“It’s not a race, it’s not an entertainment event. We didn’t explore the world to entertain other people. We did it as a natural extension of human curiosity and matching capability. And that’s what will continue to drive us.”

His professional skepticism was proven well founded when, at the 65th International Astronautical Congress in Toronto this fall, four MIT strategic engineering grad students presented a 35-page paper to independently assess the technical feasibility of Mars One’s current plan. The students concluded that (among many, many other concerns) the oxygen required to grow crops would quickly rise to deadly levels producing almost 100% humidity, requiring venting via as yet non-existent technology that would separate nitrogen and oxygen; the habitat would soon become a serious fire hazard and the colonists would likely asphyxiate as a result.

The first fatality would occur 68 days after landing.