Yes this is a one way trip. I read about this before. It's not a bad idea except that since people would be forced to live in those domes and could not venture (much, if at all) outside, and since new people would only arrive every couple of years, I'm betting that:
- People will go crazy
- Won't be able to reproduce fast enough
- Won't have enough genetic diversity if they did
- Will kill each other before the population could grow
What really needs to be done is to develop a faster, cheaper way to get to Mars AND back (See 5 ways to do this at Wired.com
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/mars.html)