At the National Press Club in Washington today, businessman and private space traveler Dennis Tito officially announced his plans to fund a private, nonprofit effort to launch the first human mission to the Red Planet, called Inspiration Mars. To take advantage of an alignment of Earth and Mars that happens once every 15 years and would allow the shortest possible travel time possible between the planets, the mission seeks to launch on January 5, 2018. The crew would return to Earth on May 21, 2019.

Tito's spacecraft will be as stripped-down as possible. There will be no landing, and no need for a landing craft. Instead, the spacecraft will fly to within 100 miles of Mars to give humans the first close-up view of the planet without actually touching down. The crew would also be kept to a bare minimum for safety: just two astronauts.

The proposed mission would blast off for Mars on a free-return trajectory. This path would slingshot the craft past Mars and back to Earth with only minimal course corrections and no additional boost. Tito says the mission's major purpose would be to inspire the people of Earth the way that the moon landings did back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This particular mission is an analogue to Apollo 8, which sent humans to the moon on a free-return flyby in 1968, one year before Armstrong and Aldrin touched down.

Even without a landing, the proposed Mars mission is a daunting proposition both from a technical and a financial point of view. Tito acknowledged that even with his deep pockets, he's going to have to raise a lot of cash. He refused to say exactly how much money he plans to commit. Who knows?" Tito said in response to PM's question on the matter. He simply promised to fund the project for the next two years.

As for total cost, Tito, indicated that it would cost "a factor of 100" less than the Apollo missions. That would put it at about $1 billion. "This is really chump change," Tito said.

Joining Tito at the announcement was Taber MacCallum, head of spacecraft-life-support-system developer Paragon Space Development Corporation and chief technical officer for Inspiration Mars; Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon; and Jayne Poynter, president of Paragon. MacCallum and Poynter served on the crew of Biosphere II, a two-year experiment that kept eight people confined for two years in an enclosed habitat from 1991 to 1993. Poynter stressed the importance of sending a husband-and-wife team on the mission to Mars. Not only would the couple's relationship help them through the hardship of the mission, she said, but the pair would also serve as inspiration to young people of both sexes back home.

The team brushed aside concerns about the technical challenges of getting a manned spacecraft to and from Mars, focusing instead on what they called the greater challenge of keeping two humans not only alive but reasonably happy and functioning well for the 501-day duration of the mission.

Tito said he hired a team of experts to study the feasibility of the mission. The effort, he said, took three months, and the conclusion was positive. The results of the study will be presented in a paper at an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) conference on Sunday.

The paper, which is also available online, assumes a SpaceX Falcon Heavy as the launch vehicle and a SpaceX Dragon space capsule as the crew vehicle, though the team said at the conference that those elements were not set, and that they would consider any set of vehicles that were available by launch day.

The mission will also use an inflatable space habitat that would launch attached to the nose of the space capsule and expand to full-size living quarters for the crew once in space. Again, the team members wouldn't commit to a supplier for that structure, but they did mention Canadian company Thin Red Line as a possibility. That company has served a subcontractor to Bigelow Aerospace, which is currently under contract to attach an inflatable structure to the International Space Station.

Futron Corporation space analyst Jeff Foust tells PM he thinks the Inspiration Mars mission is doable—if only just barely. "The first, natural reaction is, that's impossible, you can't do that," he says. But, he says, after reading the study commissioned by Tito, he's concluded that it could conceivably succeed if everything goes just right.

In the mission's favor, Foust says, is that "there's no single point of failure here. If SpaceX stumbles, then you've got Boeing or Sierra Nevada with their vehicles," he says. "One of the lucky breaks is that it's happening right when there is this capability that wasn't available two years ago"—capabilities that could be mature by launch time in 2018.

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