landing. “Not one of these is a small endeavour,” the site notes, requiring “substantial technical capacity, weight and cost”. Nevertheless, the project has already had 10,000 applicants, according to the company’s Medical Director, Norbert Kraft. He told The Guardian that the applicants so far ranged in age from 18 to at least 62 and, though they include women, they tended to be men. The reasons they gave for wanting to go were varied, he said. An American woman called Cynthia, who gave her age as 32, told the company that it was a “childhood imagining” of hers to go to Mars. She described a trip her mother had taken her on in the early 1990s to a lecture at the University of Wisconsin. She said the lecturer had been Sagan and she had asked him if he thought humans would land on Mars in her lifetime. Cynthia said: “He in turn asked me if I wanted to be trapped in a ’tin can spacecraft’ for the two years it would take to get there. I told him 'yes', he smiled, and told me in all seriousness, that yes, he absolutely believed that humans would reach Mars in my lifetime.” She told the project: “When I first heard about the Mars One project I thought, this is my chance – that childhood dream could become a reality. I could be one of the pioneers, building the first settlement on Mars and teaching people back home that there are still uncharted