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On Monday, NASA announced that it had found water on Mars. Ancient dried-up oceans and ice on the planet's polar caps had been discovered some years ago. With this latest revelation, the likelihood of finding life on Mars has increased.

Even as jokes about an imminent real-estate boom on the planet have started surfacing, some missions to colonise the Red Planet that have predated this discovery. The most controversial is Mars One, a Dutch non-profit that declared its aim of "establishing a permanent human settlement on Mars" back in 2012. This Mars mission was pitched like a competition, inviting entries from those interested and then shortlisting the people who will get to go to Mars –on a one-way ticket.

Bas Lansdorp the man behind Mars One, unlike his counterparts – Tesla Motors' and SpaceX founder Elon Musk and American billionaire and space tourist Dennis Tito – did not have enough funding to take off this project. He solved this problem by collaborating with Endemol the production house that makes the reality television show Big Brother, or Bigg Boss as its version is called in India, to broadcast the mission as an ultimate reality show.

Of the over 20,000 people who applied, 100 people were shortlisted, including three Indians. These 100 will be further reduced to 24. The trailer above shows that the mission uses the familiar storytelling style of television reality shows. In the following video, we get to meet five of the candidates, including Shradha Prasad – a mechanical engineering student from Coimbatore – chosen to be on the Mars One mission.

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"We are talking about creating a major media spectacle, much bigger than the moon landings or the Olympics, and with huge potential for revenues coming from TV rights and sponsorships", Lansdorp has reportedly said.

Since then, though, Endemol has pulled out of the production of the series. It is unclear who will be filming the process now.

The mission plans to send people to Mars in 2026 but there are doubts about whether it can achieve this target. Many see the mission as a gimmick. This insider account details how the plan is not likely to take off. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicts that even if the mission was to take off and the astronauts reached the surface unscathed, "the first person would suffocate within 68 days because of a lack of equipment to balance oxygen levels effectively".