CRI听力:Mars One in Netherlands Meet Possible Candidates

Reporter: Mars One organizers say there are 705 potential candidates left after two rounds of cuts and physical testing, from an original pool of about 200,000 applicants.

Among the remaining applicants, there are 418 men and 287 women representing a wide range of nationalities and professions.

That group is undergoing further training programs run by a panel of scientists, adventurers, and astronauts.

At the end of process, Mars One will create 10 teams, each consisting of two men and two women working to be ready for the first departure to Mars.

Bas Lansdorp is a founder of Mars One.

"Each team will consist of four people, two men and two women, and we will try to make that 4 people from different continents to really represent the Earth as much as possible."

Pamela Nicoletatos is one of the potential candidates.

The Canadian-born mother of two boys now lives in the Netherlands.

She says nothing could be more humbling than being chosen to represent the initial crew sent to colonize Mars.

"I am not looking at Mars as means to escape anything here. I am very happy here. I think it's fantastic here, it's just an opportunity to see some place else, something new, somewhere new, that's more than anything."

Andrea Boyd is another possible candidate.

She is an engineer for the European Space Agency's Astronaut Centre in Cologne.

She hopes the lessons she learned as a control system engineer at a mining operation in the Australian desert will be beneficial.

"It is a fairly big planet in itself and there is lots to be explored. As an engineer it's a constant thing of problem solving to make things work in the middle of a really harsh environment. Similar to what I was doing at the mine, you make machines work in very high temperatures, in very low temperatures. In the middle of the desert where you have a lot of dust getting in equipment as well. So, it's a good technical challenge and I find those sorts of things quite fun."

Mars One plans to land its first crew on Mars by 2025.

Additional people will be sent every two years, with the goal to establish the first human settlement on another planet.

For those who travel to Mars, returning to earth will not be possible.

Mars One has also received a variety of criticism, mostly relating to medical, technical and financial feasibility.

The project's budget stands at 6 billion US dollars.

But a similar project study by NASA estimated the cost of such a feat at 100 billion dollars.

For CRI, this is Xie Zhao.