At my org, we've had one of these round 3 candidates give a talk about it and the interview and training process they went through seemed like no joke. It seemed to me that if you were to start a company with the final selectees, it would be hard to fail.
I think there are two different ways of interpreting 'a small chance of success'. The risk of a startup failing is generally because uncertainty is very high and competition tends to be fairly strong, not because the idea startups come up with are super outlandish or seem outright impossible.
But trying to crowdfund you to Mars is a little bit like saying "I'm going to build an AGI in my garage in the next 10 years".
And I think when it comes to actually bringing people into space, we need to talk about scientific expertise, health, safety and how much of this is a publicity stunt that, if it ever happened, threatens the health of people. We're far beyond a webapp here
My issue with Mars One was that it didn’t seem very credible in achieving its goals and that worries me that now people have been burnt by Mars One, they will not take a more credible organisation seriously if/when one comes along.
That there are real problems that exist here on the Earth somehow does not preclude space exploration. Space exploration and solving problems on the Earth are not mutually exclusive activities. They can both be done in parallel and sometimes one helps the other and vice versa.