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Ottawa's Andrew Rader shortlisted for Mars One journey

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He wants to boldly go where no man has gone before.

He’s a mission integrator with SpaceX, which designs and manufactures advanced rockets, a card game designer, a nonfiction author who writes about why one-way trips to Mars make sense, an admitted Star Trek aficionado.

Andrew Rader, also known as the Discovery Channel’s Canada’s Greatest Know-it-All, hopes he will be one of a courageous few to leave Earth behind forever on their one-way voyage to the red planet about a decade from now.

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Rader, 35, who’s from Ottawa, has been involved in half a dozen space missions already. He currently lives in Los Angeles. He’s one of 54 Canadians and 705 people worldwide, shortlisted from a pool of more than 200,000 applicants for the planned Mars One journey.

After a series of interviews, if he remains in contention, Rader said, he will be subjected to training exercises and tests, and eventually, isolation studies and training in Antarctica. “Stuff like that,” he said.

The next interview will be sometime before the end of this year, he said. He doesn’t know what they’re going to ask him. It’s already been much like a “job interview process,” so far, he said. He has already been asked about his motivations and skills.

“I have an obvious interest in this area,” said Rader, citing his background in aerospace engineering. “It’s a natural fit. I have the right mindframe for this sort of thing.”

Rader holds a PhD in human spaceflight from MIT. He studied for his first degree in aerospace engineering at Carleton University, and his parents are still living in Ottawa, he said.

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“Going to space is something I always wanted to do. I never actually found it realistic,” said Rader. “I did a bunch of reading about it, and what I learned is that in order to become like Star Trek we have to push the boundaries that we have, while we can.”

Pushing space technology to its limits is something projects like the Dutch-run Mars One initiative are aiming for, he said. “It’s truly an incentive driver, and it creates a platform where we can learn and figure out how to actually do things,” he said.

He said he doesn’t know of any other shortlisted candidates from Ottawa, though he’s friends with a man from Kitchener who is in the running, and he’s spoken to a couple of people from Toronto and Nova Scotia who are also vying for a spot on the trip.

msmith@ottawacitizen.com

twitter.com/mariedanielles

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