Posted by tourdemars to Mars Society at May 13, 2002 12:00 PM

A pensioner has offered a female astronaut £6,000 to help fulfil her ambition of becoming the first person on Mars - after reading her story in The Scotsman. Joseph Singer, 75, has pledged to fund Emily MacDonald - who has dreamed of heading into space since she was six - on a training mission. Mr Singer, a retired photographer who now runs a bed and breakfast establishment in Inverness, said: "My wife died four years ago, I have no children of my own and this is something that I could do for the exploration of space. It seems very exciting. "My father-in-law was a past president of the H G Wells Society and my late wife took it up as well, so there is a link there." Miss MacDonald, from Troon, Ayrshire, who is studying for a PhD in astrophysics at Exeter College, Oxford, was selected from more than 400 applicants to spend three weeks living in a replica space probe in the Canadian Arctic.