NBA's Yao Ming: China Appoints Retired Basketball Player As Ambassador To Mars

Retired basketball player Yao Ming and 10 other celebrities have been hailed by China as the official "Ambassadors to Mars" as a way of promoting their nation's first Mars Mission for the year 2020.

Acting as ambassadors alongside the former NBA player for the Houston Rockets are Lang Ping, women's Olympic gold-medal-winning volleyball team coach; Tan Dun, a composer and conductor; Yuan Sha, a guzheng player; Liu Cixin, award-winning science-fiction writer; TFBoys, a famous Chinese boy band; and Warren Mok, Dai Tuqiang, and Wei Song, who are opera singers.

South China Morning Post reported that these ambassadors are among those who will help publicize the Mars program and help encourage interest in Science and Technology among the younger generation, as well as promote China's image in an international scale.

Unfortunately, unlike the movie "Space Jam" where Michael Jordan was able to play ball with Martians and aliens, Yao Ming's role will be more Earth-based. Reports say that China has no plans of putting a man on Mars, and are instead concentrating on something closer to home - a space base on the moon.

Still, that does not deter China's 2020 mission plans to send a solar-powered 200kg-rover to Mars as they attempt to study its soil and atmosphere. The National Space Administration also started its campaign no garner support from its public by welcoming submissions of names and logos for the mission. If successful, the mission will make China the second country to ever put a rover on Mars.

Despite its publicity, China is not the only country with its eyes on the red planet, either. CNET reported that SpaceX owner Elon Musk also outlined his plans of colonizing Mars, saying that he sees self-sustaining human civilizations living on Mars in the next 40-100 years.

Matt Damon would be proud, but it's not clear whether potatoes can actually grow and sustain a population there.