Inspiration Mars
One of the newest entrants to the private space market, the non-profit Inspiration Mars wants to send two people on a round-trip flyby of Mars in 2018. Dennis Tito is backing the company, and he hopes it spurs other daring spaceflight plans.
The venture has already received “a ton of applications” but has not yet formally announced its selection process. At this point, little is known about the types of astronauts that Inspiration Mars is seeking other than that they prefer a married older couple.
Odds of becoming an astronaut this way: 1 in 25 million (.000004 percent)*
Lets say the application is 10 pages long. If the applications they have already received weighed an actual ton, that would mean about 50,000 people are already competing with you. They’re going to pick two people, preferably a couple, putting your current odds at about 1 in 25,000 (.004 percent). But how many applications will they get when they start officially asking for them? We’ll use MarsOne’s unreliable numbers to figure this out: They received interest from 10,000 people before their call for applicants, and now that they are accepting applications, they expect a million total, which is a 100-fold increase. If the same thing happens to Inspiration Mars, you will have 5 million rivals for two spots, reducing your chances to 1 in 25 million (.000004 percent).
Image: Inspiration Mars