Exactly what HER point is! She SHOULD do more research and investigation into the real challenges of a manned mission to Mars. But I disagree that Maggie wants to be a reality star. I take her at her word that she genuinely wants to explore space and be one of the first humans on Mars.
However, making the equivocation that traveling in a vessel about the size of a station wagon for 18 months to pioneer a human settlement on a hostile planet with the known certainty of an early demise is JUST LIKE creating an elaborate costume for a convention is asinine.
It's not that Maggie, or the rest of the Mars One fans, don't know how to successfully travel to Mars or not, it's that they don't know how much they don't know about successfully traveling to Mars.
Granted, she is more intelligent and successful than I am in this earthly life. She's an electrical engineer and a business owner. I am an audio clown. But neither of those qualifications is enough to convince me that she or any other space-enthusiast has the ability to not die in a planet-size desert.
MarsOne is playing on our good intentions and our underlying arrogance, and it's gotten some decent people telling their families they are leaving earth forever, never to be heard from again. It's a science-cult, like the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Think about it this way, if you heard a company was sending civilians with no survival training into space to land on a different planet, you'd think that either this is an evil company from a video game, or I made it up to put into my upcoming video game. Thankfully, it looks like the money is drying up and the true character of the organization is being revealed. Otherwise, we'd have to stop these people.