“We are very excited about this book because it allows us to share viewpoints on some of the most intriguing questions being asked about the mission,” said Bas Lansdorp, CEO and co-founder of Mars One.                  

In 2012, Mars One announced intentions to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars; they launched their astronaut selection program in 2013 and received thousands of applications. Edited by Norbert Kraft, MD, Mars One’s Chief Medical Officer and head of the crew selection and training committee, as well as committee members James R. Kass, PhD, and Raye Kass, PhD, Mars One: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure provides a behind-the-scenes look at the process and criteria used to choose candidates, as well as fascinating details about their future lives on Mars.

The foreword is written by Prof. Dr. Gerard ‘t Hooft, Nobel-Prize winning theoretical physicist. Other contributors include Dr. Mason Peck, Prof. Thais Russomano, and Jamie Guined, M.Ed., MBA.

Within Mars One: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, readers will discover:    

• What essential training and skills will the Mars One astronauts need to develop to survive on Mars?
• What combination of genders and ages make for the most effective four-person crew? How do individual cultural backgrounds factor in?
• Will settlers be able to communicate with Earth?
• What can the Mars One mission learn from past periods of human exploration?
• What are the complexities of a group of four, and ultimately hundreds, operating with complete independence from human societies on Earth?
• What are the psychological ramifications of knowing your actions are being watched by millions of people? What does Mars One hope watching the process will mean for viewers at home?

The challenges of landing and colonizing Mars may seem daunting, but that has been true for ever leap forward. Mars One’s mission is the next giant leap for mankind, and with Mars One: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, people everywhere can look behind the curtains of Mars One’s astronaut selection process.                              

About the Authors
Norbert Kraft, MD, received “The NASA Group Achievement Award 2013,” one of the most prestigious awards a group can receive, presented to selected groups who have distinguished themselves by making outstanding contributions to the NASA mission. In 2010, Kraft received the 2010 Award for “Outstanding Accomplishments in the Psychological and Psychiatric Aspects of Aerospace Medicine.”

He has over 20 years of experience in aviation and aerospace research and development. His primary area of expertise is developing physiological and psychological countermeasures to combat the negative effects of long-duration spaceflight. Dr. Kraft’s experiences span Europe, Asia, and the United States, where he has worked for several international space agencies, including the Russian Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency. Dr. Kraft is an author of over 40 papers in the field of aerospace medicine, including a seminal paper on intercultural crew issues in long-duration spaceflight. He has an M.D. from University of Vienna, Austria, and is a Fellow of the Aerospace Medical Association.

Dr. James R. Kass has been working in the field of human spaceflight for more than 30 years. He was an investigator on the first Spacelab mission in the early 80s in the field of neurophysiology. In the decade following, he gained industrial experience at several aerospace companies in Germany, before joining the European Space Agency at its research and technology centre, ESTEC, in the Netherlands.

Dr. Kass has trained astronauts and worked on the ground operations teams for several Spacelab / Space Shuttle and MIR missions (including the tragic STS-107), with crews from Russia, USA, Middle and Far East, and several European countries. He has also worked with cosmonauts of the former Salyut space station and astronauts of the first US space station, Skylab. He has participated as scientist and reviewer in several isolation experiments investigating psychology of long-duration isolation, as one will certainly encounter on Mars.

Dr. Raye Kass, Professor of Applied Human Sciences at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, currently spearheads group theory courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Dr. Kass has been highlighted frequently by both national and international press agencies for both her space sciences and group theory research. Dr. Kass has also been invited to be involved in numer- ous space research projects in conjunction with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, including the Psychological Experiment/Training Programme for the CAPSULS Mission held in Canada, the SFINCCS mission held in Russia, and the NSBRI (National Space Biomedical Research Institute) Ground-based Research Project with the NASA Ames Research Centre in the USA.

Dr. Kass is the author of Theories of Small Group Development, as well as the coauthor of three other books on group theory.

About Mars One
Mars One is a not for profit foundation with the goal of establishing a permanent human settlement on Mars. To prepare for this settlement the first unmanned mission is scheduled to depart in 2020. Crews will depart for their one-way journey to Mars starting in 2026; subsequent crews will depart every 26 months after the initial crew has left for Mars. Mars One is a global initiative aiming to make this everyone's mission to Mars, including yours. Join Mars One’s efforts to enable the next giant leap for mankind.

For more information about Mars One, please visit www.mars-one.com.