Yesterday, at a press conference, millionaire Dennis Tito officially announced the project of its Inspiration Mars Foundation to send two astronauts on a journey to Mars and back. According to his intentions, the mission is supposed to start in early 2018 to take advantage of the closeness between the Earth and Mars and last 501 days.
Dennis Tito isn’t a man who woke up one day with the desire to set up a space mission. Born in 1940, he earned a bachelor of science in astronautics and aeronautics at New York University in 1962 and a Master of Science in engineering science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In the course of his life, Tito has also worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before opening his consulting and technology services company.
In 2001, Dennis Tito became the first space tourist since he spent about eight days on the International Space Station. That journey was criticized by the then NASA administrator, perhaps because it made with the Russian Space Agency. In fact, he arrived on the Station on the Soyuz TM-32 spacecraft and then returned to Earth on the Soyuz TM-31, which had arrived months before in a previous mission. He’s reported to have paid $20 million for that journey.
Dennis Tito opened Inspiration Mars Foundation, a nonprofit organization, to set up a mission to Mars. The plan is to get private funding but they don’t really know what it will cost. To keep costs below those of the Mars Rover Curiosity mission the use of existing technologies was announced, though some of them haven’t been used yet such as the inflatable module. It should be used as a habitat with the advantage that it can be inflated after the departure and deflated before the arrival.
In the Inspiration Mars Foundation team there are Taber MacCallum and his wife Jane Poynter, founders of Paragon Space Development Corporation, a company that provides hardware for space missions. The couple has also been part of the experiment Biosphere 2, a structure containing a self-sustaining ecosystem in which groups of people are living in isolation to simulate the possible conditions in outposts on the Moon or other planets.
If the Inspiration Mars Foundation starship could leave as scheduled, on January 5, 2018, it would reach Mars on August 20, 2018, passing at a minimum distance from the red planet of about 100 km (about 62 miles). The return to Earth would be on May 21, 2019.
Given the length of the journey and the fact that the spacecraft would be very small, the idea is to have a crew of a man and a woman, preferably a mature married couple. Taber MacCallum and his wife Jane Poynter are among the candidates.
Lately, space missions have been announced that only a few years ago would have seemed pure science fiction so the Inspiration Mars Foundation one doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. As for the others, we have only to wait for its development to see if it’s really going to happen.
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