most likely potential astronauts but was, instead, based on how many “supporter points” each had earned through acts such as buying official merchandise. He writes: “These points are Mars One’s supporter points which 'represent the degree of your support to Mars One’s mission'.” These points play no role in the selection process and serve only to show how much each supporter has donated to Mars One.” The official timeline for the mission says the group plans to dispatch a stationary lander and satellite to Mars in 2018, followed by a rover in 2020 and cargo missions starting in 2022. Humans would start arriving in 2025 and crews of four would be sent every two years to add to the settlement. They would not return to Earth. In February, a prominent supporter of the project, Gerard’t Hooft, a Dutch Nobel laureate in physics, said he did not believe this timetable was realistic. He said: “It will take quite a bit longer and be quite a bit more expensive. When they first asked me to be involved, I told them: 'You have to put a zero after everything'.” Roche also spoke to Medium, a US blogging platform that has previously expressed grave sceptism about Mars One, reporting among other things that the supposed 200,000 applications to be astronauts in fact totalled 2,761. He told Medium about the selection process in more detail: “I have not met anyone from