• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, August 20, 2015

Space travel is no longer the exclusive pursuit of nation states, as illustrated by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Pioneering space exploration won’t be far behind.

One of the weirder projects spawned by the democratization of space flight is Mars One, an independent program that seeks to send human colonists on a one-way trip to Mars, where they will most likely perish sooner rather than later.

Obviously, it takes a very special kind of person to even consider volunteering for such a mission -- the kind of person who is natural fodder for a reality video documentary series. Thankfully, technology blog Engadget is doing just that, with a new digital video series called “Citizen Mars,” set to blast off (get it?) Sept.1.

“Citizen Mars” will follow the lives of five aspiring Mars “colonists,” the term favored by enthusiasts.

There’s Sue Ann Pien, 35, who works at a small tech company and lives in Los Angeles with her partner, Cynthia Catania, a singer-songwriter. Then there’s Mohammed Sallam, 32, lives in Cairo, works in life insurance, and plays professional basketball for a team in Egypt. Another aspirant, Pietro Aliprandi, 25, lives in Trieste, Italy, recently completed medical school, has written an unpublished novel and produced a feature-length film that was never distributed.

There’s also Adriana Marais, 31, from Cape Town, South Africa, who recently completed a Ph.D. in quantum biology. Finally, there’s Shradha Prasad, 19, from Coimbatore, India, a mechanical-engineering student who loves go-karts.

To be fair, Mars One claims that the journey to Mars won’t be a suicide mission, per se, but a real attempt to establish a permanent colony on the Red Plant. But first attempts at colonization rarely end well (see: Roanoke, Jamestown) and students from MIT have cast doubt on the viability of the Mars One plan.

According to their analysis, the colonists would face so many environmental and logistical obstacles that the first settler would die after a little less than two months.