Australian Josh Richards has made it on to the shortlist to go on a one-way trip to Mars.

He’s on the final list of 100 from 200,000 applicants for the Mars One trip that aims to establish a permanent settlement on the planet.

Mars One is an international not for profit organisation based in the Netherlands, Richards told Afternoons.

“They have folks working globally on this, but it is basically the brain child of two guys in the Netherlands, two kind of crazy Dutch guys that decided sending people one-way to Mars was the way to go.”

Richards own background is by any standards varied.

“I originally discovered Mars One when I was living in the UK. I had been working there as a stand-up comic for about 4 or 5 years and I was strangely enough writing this comedy show about sending people one way to Mars.”

Whilst he was doing his physics degree he discovered we had the technology to get to Mars but not to bring people back and that piqued his interest, he says.

“Between the physics degree and the background in stand-up comedy I spent a lot of time in the military, I served with the Australian army as an engineer for quite a few years, then the Navy and I’d actually moved the UK initially to serve with the Royal Marine Commandos.”

This mixed experience has stood him in good stead as an applicant for the mission, he says.

“Mars One’s approach is to send generalists who are skilled in a lot of different areas, because we can have those experts back here on Earth and send them a message how do we fix this particular problem, but we need people who can adapt and be resilient and come up with solutions quickly during an emergency before we then get information back on how to fix things long term.”

Counter-intuitively, one of the groups automatically disqualified from the mission is current astronauts.

“The kind of mission we are talking about is radically different from what has been done previously.

“Their skill sets would actually be prohibitive in some cases, we would have to un-train them before we could train them in what we need specifically for Mars.”

The International Space Station is designed to be repairable and then a replacement sent in 3 to 6 months, he says.

“For Mars were looking at anything between 12 to 24 months so the engineering has to be different so that things are much more resilient and coming from a different design perspective.”

He likens it to the American versus Russian design philosophy.

“The Americans basically design Formula 1 type space craft, they are amazingly high performance, they’ve got all the bits and pieces and have heated seats and all that sort of thing.

“The Russians design spaceships that are highly practical and if anything, we need to design things that are more in line with the Russian design philosophy.

“It works, it’s easy to repair and we can hit it with a hammer and it will probably be just fine.”

He signed up for the mission in 2012.

“My resolve around this hasn’t ever changed and in fact my interest in it came before Mars One even gave me the opportunity to sign up.

“I was deeply frustrated that we as species hadn’t been beyond low Earth orbit since 1971, the last time anyone was more than 680 km from Earth was Apollo 17 when they were coming back from the Moon.”

It frustrates him that humanity seems to have given up on exploration.

“If we as a species are going to become explorers .. then we need to go and do these things with the knowledge that Earth may be beautiful and special, but it is not the only place in the universe to explore.”

He sees the Mission as positive and says his family has become accustomed to the idea of him not coming home from his time serving overseas in the Army.

“I’d much rather die on a one-way trip to Mars than I would in a poppy field in Afghanistan.”

Nevertheless, he says the likelihood of the Mars one mission actually happening is slim

“Specifically, with the organisation I’ve been involved with for all these years, to be honest with you, the chances of it actually coming off are looking more and more unlikely, but the reality is it is taking an important step forward for everybody.”

He says floating the idea of a one-way mission has changed the conversation.

“Whoever goes to Mars first needs to be working on the principle that they won’t be coming back again.”