200,000 brave and/or insane people have supposedly signed up for a one-way mission to Mars. But the truth about Mars One, the company behind the effort, is much weirder (and far more worrying) than anyone has previously reported.

By Elmo Keep
Illustrations by Josh Cochran
Photographs by Daniel Boud

When Josh was 10 years old, he sat cross-legged on the floor in his parent’s neat, suburban home in Australia, enraptured. It was May 1996 and Andy Thomas had just stepped out of the space shuttle Endeavour and onto the tarmac of Runway 33 of the Kennedy Space Center. In his flight suit, bright orange against the blue of the sky, he talked in his clipped and measured British-sounding tones about seeing his hometown of Adelaide from the God-like vantage of space. These TV images would stick in Josh’s mind like gum to a boot sole.

Andy Thomas was just like Josh, Josh reckoned. He was an Australian. An Australian who’d made it all the way to NASA. Who’d been to space and back. And everyone in the world, it seemed, wanted to talk to him about it. If Andy…