Posted on 04/18/2019 6:41:18 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Surrounded by barren hills in northwestern Gansu province, "Mars Base 1" opened on Wednesday with the aim of exposing teens—and soon tourists—to what life could be like on the planet.
Built at a cost of 50 million yuan ($7.47 million), the base was constructed with help from the Astronauts Centre of China and the China Intercontinental Communication Centre, a state television production organisation.
The teenagers go on treks in the desert, where they explore caves in the martian-like landscape. The closest town is Jinchang, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) away.
On Wednesday, over 100 students from a nearby high school walked on the arid Gobi plains, dressed in spacesuit-esque tracksuits.
The company behind the project, C-Space, plans to open the base—currently an educational facility—to tourists in the next year, complete with a themed hotel and restaurant to attract space geeks.
It follows a similar Mars "village" that opened last month in the Qaidam Basin of neighbouring Qinghai—a brutally hot and dry region which is the highest desert in the world, considered the best replica of Mars' surface conditions.
But the C-Space project has faced criticism from some quarters of the scientific community.
Jiao Weixin, a professor at the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Peking University, said the building and surrounding desert were hardly representative of the truly hostile conditions on Mars.
To truly replicate the harsh, toxic conditions of Mars would be to create a truly hostile environment, which is expensive and "completely unnecessary", he said.
"From the very beginning, I've been opposed to this," Jiao told AFP. "Tourism doesn't make much sense ... what is the meaning in it?"
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Beer that isn’t beer.
Eggs that aren’t eggs.
Mars Camp on Earth, “We GUARANTEE this is Mars..!”
THAT is China.
*ping of possible interest*
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