Humans may travel to Mars and back sooner than anticipated if Dennis Tito has his way.

The pioneering space tourist's Inspiration Mars Foundation is holding a press conference next week and the buzz is that Tito is planning to announce a target date in January 2018 to launch a 501-day roundtrip mission to the Red Planet.

The non-profit Inspiration Mars Foundation's press conference is scheduled for next Wednesday.

"This 'Mission for America' will generate new knowledge, experience and momentum for the next great era of space exploration. It is intended to encourage all Americans to believe again, in doing the hard things that make our nation great, while inspiring youth through Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and motivation," the foundation said in a press release quoted by Space.com.

The mission would reportedly utilize a deep-space version of the SpaceX Dragon capsule and its future-generation Falcon Heavy rocket, which the private spaceflight company is currently developing.

SpaceX's Dragon has not yet been used to transport humans into space but last year it was reported that the company was looking to undertake a low-orbit manned mission as early as 2015.

Reports indicate that the Inspiration Mars Foundation doesn't plan to land astronauts on Mars in its initial mission, but rather have their spacecraft swing by the planet before returning home much as the Apollo Program conducted flybys of the Moon before undertaking landing missions.

In fact, the actual time spent at Mars could be very brief indeed. The Inspiration Mars Foundation mission could involve a mere half-orbit of the planet used to slingshot the spacecraft along its trajectory back to Earth, according to Dvice.com.

That would mean the first human visitors to Mars would travel through space for hundreds of days only to spend just a couple of hours in the proximity of the planet once they'd arrived.

Getting a Mars mission launched by 2018 makes sense, because Earth and its neighbor won't be as close to each other again until the year 2031, Dvice.com pointed out.

Tito (pictured above) made history when he became the world's first "space tourist" in mid-2001, plunking down a reported $20 million to hitch a ride on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station, where he spent eight days in space.

Other private spaceflight enterprises and non-profits, as well as national space agencies like NASA, have talked up manned missions to Mars in recent years, but most have suggested such an expedition wouldn't take place until the 2020s.

NASA, for instance, is developing its deep-space Orion spacecraft with a possible trip to Mars in mind, as well as kicking around the idea of building a permanent space station in orbit around the Moon that could serve as a launching pad for missions to Mars and near-Earth asteroids.

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