There is a saying at Houston’s Mission Control: “in God we trust, all others bring data.” I’ve seen that codified more bluntly in a refrigerator magnet: “We have charts and graphs to back us up, so #uck off.” Because of the profanity, the former was probably a more appropriate title for a debate that occurred on the campus of the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, on Thursday evening when two representatives of Mars One squared off against two of the members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology group that produced a report a year ago calling into question the assertions that Mars One has made about the viability of their plan for sending humans to Mars within twelve years.

The MIT team, Sydney Do and Andrew Owens, both graduate research fellows and Ph.D. candidates at MIT, came armed with charts and graphs and data and PowerPoint (they are, after all, engineers.) The Mars One team, CEO Bas Lansdorp and one of his key technical people, Barry Finger, came armed with, well, a dream of sending humans to Mars. A nice fuzzy dream, filled with hope and powered by the human spirit and the desire to motivate schoolchildren.

The MIT team crushed them.

posted 3164 days ago