Dennis Tito, a
billionaire financier who in 2001 became the first space tourist, has launched
a project to send two civilians on “an historic journey” to the Red Planet in
January 2018.
“We have not sent humans beyond the moon in more
than 40 years,” Mr Tito said at a press conference in Washington on Wednesday.
“I’ve been waiting, and a lot of people my age, have been waiting. And I think
it’s time to put an end to that lapse”.
The mission, a “return fly-by”, in which the
spacecraft would fly around Mars rather than land, would last for 500 days. It
is expected to cost between $1 billion and $2 billion, which Mr Tito is hoping
to fund partly through television rights and by selling data to Nasa. His
organisation, Inspiration Mars, is planning to select a middle-aged couple who
may have already had children and would be willing to risk the potential risk
to their fertility of being exposed to radiation for a prolonged period.
They would be forced to spend a year and a half
together in a 14ft x 12 ft Dragon space craft, accompanied by supplies ranging
from more than a tonne of dehydrated food to 28kg of lavatory paper. As for why
they were specifically seeking a couple to make the flight, “this is very
symbolic, and we really need it to represent humanity with a man and a woman,”
Taber MacCallum , chief technical officer and potential crew member told the
media.
He said if it is a man and a woman on such a long,
cramped voyage, it makes sense for them to be married so that they can give
each other the emotional support that will probably need when they look out the
window and see Earth get smaller and more distant, adding: “If that’s not
scary, I don’t know what is.”
Anu Ojha, a director of the National Space Academy
in Leicester, said that unlike the unmanned probes landed on the surface of
Mars, the mission would not be able to bring back useful data on the planet.
However “as an exemplar of human endurance and
exploration this mission is totally unprecedented,” said Mr Ojha. “This would
be an Apollo 8 moment — but lasting a year and a half rather than six days, and
with no meaningful abort options once on its way”.
The mission has been scheduled for 5 January, 2018,
in order to take advantage of an alignment in the planets that occurs once
every 15 years. Mr Tito, 72, said he was determined to complete the mission
because he feared not being around for the first manned mission to Mars being
planned by the US government for the mid 2030s. He said that one of the
questions he hoped to help answer was: “How do humans behave when they look out
and see this pale blue dot that they can barely differentiate from a star?”
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