Mars One: Va Beach woman makes first round of cuts for …

If Lt. Heidi Beemer has her way, she'll die on Mars.

Not anytime soon, mind you. The 25-year-old Virginia Beach native wants a long life, but she wants to live it out as a colonist on the red planet.

In December, Beemer got a little closer to that dream when she made the first cut of an international effort to start sending humans on a one-way trip to Mars beginning in 2024. As envisioned by Mars One, a nonprofit group based in the Netherlands, four colonists would arrive every two years after that, building a permanent settlement.

"It will be lonely for eight years, nine years," Beemer said in a phone interview from Kentucky, where she's stationed at Fort Campbell. She's applying for the mission outside of her Army service. "But as the colony grows, there will be a new community. Jamestown that's something that throughout my entire life was, 'Hey, these people came, they left their families behind, they left everything that they knew to set up a new life, to push the frontiers.' If no one is willing to make those sacrifices, we'll never do it."

Mars One estimates it will cost $6 billion for that first trip, and $4 billion for each subsequent one. Founders hope to fund them through public and private donations.

Semi-finalists will begin interviews in the spring, Beemer said, and the next round of cuts will be announced in mid-summer.

Beemer credits her father, a Navy veteran, for her lifelong desire to be an astronaut.

"I first really got interested in Mars in, I guess, '97 when the (Pathfinder) rover first landed on Mars," Beemer said. "My dad gave me a newspaper article, and I thought it was the coolest thing."

She wavered a bit in 2003 when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the atmosphere, killing all its crew.

"I thought, 'Oh, man, I really don't want to die,'" Beemer said. "'So I want to work for NASA and help other people get into space.'"

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