Interested in space travel?
Well, get ready - Virgin pairs with Google - over the jump.
Virgle's site includes an invitation to you:
Earth has issues, and it's time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.
And FAQ's:
How hard is it to land on the Martian surface?
Getting to Mars is actually (relatively) easy; it's landing that's tricky. In order to get to Mars the Virgle ships will need to build up enough delta v that when we reach the planet we'll be traveling on the order of 3 miles per second, with a quite heavy ship. Recall your high school physics: kinetic energy rises with the square of speed, and all this energy has to go back to zero when we land. One way might be to use atmospheric friction to slow down -- but the Martian atmosphere is so thin that we won't have enough altitude to slow down fast enough to avoid crashing. So our mission plan will have to employ a combination of technologies to land the staging, mission and crew vehicles, including biconics, split body flaps, feathered reentries and vectored impulse breaking.
The beauty is that it's (OF COURSE!) open source!
An Open Source Planet
Project Virgle comprises three equal partners: Google, Virgin and a diffuse network of talented individuals who want to participate in our mission. Tapping into this global network means organizing our venture around the model that will most efficiently liberate and reward individual knowledge, effort and creativity while creating strong incentives for investing companies.
In other words, from end to end, Project Virgle will be open source.
And don't forget to take the Become A Pioneer Application
On an (un)related note, check out the iRon from Gear4.
Update Changed title for users who think you can add and subtract words.