Mars One has a grand plan to beat the big names in aerospace to the first manned mission to the Red Planet. But the chances of the dream ever getting off the ground appear to grow slimmer by the day (especially after an insider revealed some more of the organization's troubles this week).

Mars One doesn't have a proven spacecraft or a clear plan to sustain its human habitation on Mars. But here's another problem—perhaps one you hadn't thought about—that's dogging this mission. Mars One would be almost impossible to insure.

Risk Assessment

Insurance is one of those arcane details of spaceflight that doesn't draw much attention, but many NASA missions require the company or organization responsible for the payload to put some form of insurance on it. (It insures its own missions.) There's a lot of money going into space missions, whether you're talking about the rocket, payload, or passengers. Space is an inherently risky business, but NASA wants to shore up as much liability as possible.

Apollo astronauts gave their families autographed envelopes as an alternative to life insurance

While the dollar figures are astronomical and the missions are exotic, space missions are just like anything else when it comes to insurance: The riskier and less proven something is, the less likely an insurance agency will want to back it. The moon missions of the 60s and early 70s were so dangerous that nobody would cover the men, so Apollo astronautsgave their families a stack of autographed envelopes as an alternative to life insurance. When disaster struck the Columbia mission, the crew's families werecovered by standard federal life insurance policies, but NASA had no special insurance for astronauts, despite the risks.

All this is bad news for Mars One, which is not only an upstart trying to get into a dangerous game, but also one with little real-world technology to show for its efforts. We don't know much about its plans for space habitation, transport, food and fuel, EVA suits, or other mission details beyond getting to Mars.

As for getting there, the organization votednot to proceed with a robotic precursor mission that could have proven out some of its systems—a rather odd step for an organization that insists it's serious. Mars One now says it is likely to rely on a private space company to ferry them to Mars. Of course, the class of rocket needed to do that is still under development, like NASA's Space Launch System (which just completed the first test of its booster rockets) or a descendant of Space X's Falcon Heavy. Both those entities also have their eyes on Mars, but both rockets require years of vigorous testing and provable technology.

Your coverage has terminated

All of this adds up to a whole lot of uncertainty, the insurance agent's enemy. So we asked Ludovic Arnoux, Global Head of Aviation Risk Consulting for Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS), about what it might take to insure a space mission. Arnoux's company, Allianz, provides insurance to a variety of aeronautics and aerospace companies, and has experience with determining the risk of space missions.

"There's no way to gauge that this will be the experience of the crew in an unproven environment."

In the case of Mars One, he says, the launch is probably insurable, since a proven agency like SpaceX or NASA would be in charge of it. But the coverage would end once the craft separated from the first stage and proceeded on its way to the Red Planet.

"The AGCS underwriting policy is very prudent regarding new technologies – even more in a space environment," Arnoux says. "Although Mars One mission claims that the technology will be flight-proven, there's no way to gauge that this will be the experience of the crew in an unproven environment." As a result, Arnoux says, insurance of a Mars colony would be possible only after several years of proven success.

Exploration means risk

Mars One has said it received upwards of 200,000 applications from people who wanted to go to Mars. Joseph Roche, one of the finalists who's now crying foul, says that's not actually true and that Mars One actually received 2,761 applications. Whichever number is closer to the truth, the fact is that a real Mars One mission—if it beat the odds and came to fruition—would carry four initial passengers. Four passengers who are perfectly fine with never returning to the Earth.

Knowing that fact, on top of knowing the odds stacked against Mars One, might make you wonder whether the insurance question matters. But when disaster strikes, any family members left behind won't have the courtesy of life insurance to fall back on. Investors in the company (some of whom are the participants themselves) won't have a leg to stand on if there's a failure in the mission, even in something as simple as a resupply mission.

The fact that the insurance industry won't touch this mission speaks to a bigger problem for future ideas of colonizing other worlds—even missions with a steadier foundation than Mars One. Yes, a billionaire like Elon Musk might decide simply to accept the risk of going to Mars and put his own money toward it, but insurance woes are a much bigger problem for Mars One and its nebulous funding strategy.

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