This paper explores the intersections of media, science and the popular understandings of human spaceflight within the context of the Mars One project. By using contemporary literary and media critiques in this examination, this paper contends that the ostensibly technoscientific project of Mars One is, first and foremost, a media object. The Mars One project can be critically deconstructed as part of the mythological and symbolic activity of human spaceflight in science fiction, popular culture and media constructions. For a multitude of rationales, and espousing good faith, currently over 700 humans on the list of astronaut candidates for the Mars One project are participants in the spectacular narrative of spaceflight beyond this planet. The Mars One endeavour forms a junction of the material (the technological and engineering features) and the purely imaginary. This makes it possible to apply transdisciplinary modes of examination to it as both a technoscientific structure and as a public performance, and to critique the subtexts within its mediated backdrop. The Mars One project and its public relations campaign are a subset of the narratives which include the realities of the extension of the human realm to orbital space and beyond, which contain their own mythology and symbolism that will be surveyed here. In turn, the narratives of space flight are a subset of thematically linked narrative trajectories of exploration in technoscience, art and politics. These encompass libidinous and actual landscapes as well as psychic extensions of the self beyond the egoic and corporeal boundaries, and extension of other imaginary structures such as nations and races. The trope of the heroic explorer is not confined to the epic which is human spaceflight, but in the domain of astronautics it reaches an intensity unmatched since the 20th Century conquests of the Poles. The real and hypothetical dangers faced by space farers in general, and by the Mars One colonists, in particular, form a major symbolic and performative component of this narrative. The necessity of physical risk to the heroic is due to the audience's anxious identification with, and psychological investment in, the hero, in the relationship between the performer and observer. This explains in part the deep public fascination with exploration, on Earth and beyond. The Mars One project has caught the public imagination, because it contains within it elements of an ancient mythos and the extravagant conjurings of contemporary media practices.
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