Tycoon proposes to send married couple around Mars
WASHINGTON (AP) - In less than five years, a married couple could be on their way toward Mars in an audacious but bare-bones private mission that would slingshot them around the red planet, under a plan announced Wednesday by a financial tycoon and his team.
The voyage to Mars and back would be a cosmic no-frills flight that would take the husband-and-wife astronauts as close as 100 miles to the planet, but it would also mean being cooped up for 16 months in a cramped space capsule half the size of an RV.
The private, nonprofit project, called Inspiration Mars, will get initial money from multimillionaire investment consultant Dennis Tito, the first space tourist. The team would not say how much the overall flight would cost, but outsiders put it at more than $1 billion.
NASA will not be involved. Instead, the project's backers intend to use a private rocket and space capsule and some kind of habitat that might be inflatable, employing an austere design that could take people to Mars for a fraction of what it would cost NASA to do with robots, officials said.
The crew members will have no lander to go down to the planet, and no spacesuits to go out for any spacewalk. They will have minimal food and clothing, and their urine will be recycled into drinking water.
"This is not going to be an easy mission," chief technical officer and potential crew member Taber MacCallum said in an interview. "We called it the Lewis and Clark trip to Mars."
It also involves a huge risk, more than a government agency like NASA would normally permit, officials concede.
"It's a risk well worth taking," MacCallum said. He said it harkens back to the days when people took risks when it was meaningful, and he said it could be an inspiration, especially to students.
As for why a couple will make the flight, "this is very symbolic and we really need it to represent humanity with a man and a woman," MacCallum said.
He said if it is a man and a woman on such a long, close-quarters 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: "If that's not scary, I don't know what is."
The project aims to capitalize on the once-in-a-generation close approach of the two planets' orbits. The timeline for the 501-day mission is set out in a technical paper to be presented next month at a scientific meeting. It calls for a launch on Jan. 5, 2018, a Mars flyby on Aug. 20, 2018, and a return to Earth on May 21, 2019.
In a statement, NASA spokesman David Steitz said the venture validates President Barack Obama's decision to rely more on private sector ingenuity to explore space, and is "a testament to the audacity of America's commercial aerospace industry and the adventurous spirit of America's citizen-explorers."
He said "NASA will continue discussions with Inspiration Mars to see how the agency might collaborate on mutually beneficial activities."
Stanford University professor Scott Hubbard, NASA's former Mars mission chief, said that the team's technical paper is "long on inspiration, short on technical details. What is there is correct."
"It's sort of an audacious thing to say, 'I'm going to fly by Mars in five years,'" said MacCallum, who was part of a team that lived for two years in Biosphere 2, a sort of giant terrarium on Earth that was supposed to replicate a mission on another planet.
The voyage to Mars and back would be a cosmic no-frills flight that would take the husband-and-wife astronauts as close as 100 miles to the planet, but it would also mean being cooped up for 16 months in a cramped space capsule half the size of an RV.
The private, nonprofit project, called Inspiration Mars, will get initial money from multimillionaire investment consultant Dennis Tito, the first space tourist. The team would not say how much the overall flight would cost, but outsiders put it at more than $1 billion.
NASA will not be involved. Instead, the project's backers intend to use a private rocket and space capsule and some kind of habitat that might be inflatable, employing an austere design that could take people to Mars for a fraction of what it would cost NASA to do with robots, officials said.
The crew members will have no lander to go down to the planet, and no spacesuits to go out for any spacewalk. They will have minimal food and clothing, and their urine will be recycled into drinking water.
"This is not going to be an easy mission," chief technical officer and potential crew member Taber MacCallum said in an interview. "We called it the Lewis and Clark trip to Mars."
It also involves a huge risk, more than a government agency like NASA would normally permit, officials concede.
"It's a risk well worth taking," MacCallum said. He said it harkens back to the days when people took risks when it was meaningful, and he said it could be an inspiration, especially to students.
As for why a couple will make the flight, "this is very symbolic and we really need it to represent humanity with a man and a woman," MacCallum said.
He said if it is a man and a woman on such a long, close-quarters 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: "If that's not scary, I don't know what is."
The project aims to capitalize on the once-in-a-generation close approach of the two planets' orbits. The timeline for the 501-day mission is set out in a technical paper to be presented next month at a scientific meeting. It calls for a launch on Jan. 5, 2018, a Mars flyby on Aug. 20, 2018, and a return to Earth on May 21, 2019.
In a statement, NASA spokesman David Steitz said the venture validates President Barack Obama's decision to rely more on private sector ingenuity to explore space, and is "a testament to the audacity of America's commercial aerospace industry and the adventurous spirit of America's citizen-explorers."
He said "NASA will continue discussions with Inspiration Mars to see how the agency might collaborate on mutually beneficial activities."
Stanford University professor Scott Hubbard, NASA's former Mars mission chief, said that the team's technical paper is "long on inspiration, short on technical details. What is there is correct."
"It's sort of an audacious thing to say, 'I'm going to fly by Mars in five years,'" said MacCallum, who was part of a team that lived for two years in Biosphere 2, a sort of giant terrarium on Earth that was supposed to replicate a mission on another planet.
bottle up for 16 months with your wife???? no way
"As for why a couple will make the flight, 'this is very symbolic and we really need it to represent humanity with a man and a woman,' MacCallum said."
Yeah, because all those Apollo flights were so gay..
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If you think about it though, zero-gravity sex could be a bit of a challenge..
But the wife cannot be named Alice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpHzPzjUTY8
Maybe they just want to know the effects of Viagra in zero gravity
@WendyTeagarden  "It's been more than 4 hours??  Houston, we have a problem."
@WendyTeagarden Disappointment? That would be so hard to huh.......manuvere.
All joking aside, and this is pretty fertile ground, how do they plan to shield the pair from cosmic radiation and solar flares? Â
@Festivus My thoughts exactly. Cosmic radiation is the single biggest obstacle in my opinion to sending humans beyond the Earth-Moon system.
Unless they've invented some very light shielding material, a problem NASA has been studying for decades to no avail, these folks are in for a big surprise. The "easiest" solution I've seen is either hollow out an asteroid to use as the vehicle, which means we need to capture an asteroid, then hollow it out using robots and build it into a space vessel, or send up a craft with very heavy shielding, which is prohibitively expensive.
Another idea is to use water within the walls of the craft as shielding, but that's pretty tricky and expensive, too. I guess they could wait for a space elevator, but none of this is an option by 2018.
Is this a "suicide mission"?
Murder/suicide in the making.
I'm old and cucumbers give me gas.
@Agness P Weatherby ...not if you juice them......
The trip would surely sterilized them
"and their urine will be recycled into drinking water."
No freakin' way.
@Kushfan And what will the burritos b recycled.from?
Now that would be a honeymoon, I wonder how many would come back wanting a divorce?
Space the final frontier of Ponzi schemes.
"NASA will not be involved. Instead, the project's backers intend to use a private rocket and space capsule"
Read - Yugo.
@Kushfan Is he a Russian author?
@WendyTeagarden And he builds spaceships in his spare time.
@Kushfan Â
yeah...I guess that the lucky couple has 5 years to determine if they can make it 16 months. Â I would give odds a thousand to one that this would be a one way trip for one or both of them. Â And, clearly sterilization would be required in advance...just in case so they wouldn't be Catholic.
Just curious...who has jurisdiction for criminal acts in space? Like if she clocked him over the head and jettisoned his body into space would the FBI be waiting for her at JFK and upon what jurisdiction?
@Icarus @Kushfan Why don't you volunteer, just don't fly to close to Sun, OK?
@Icarus 5 years and 16 months puts them awfully close to that seven-year itch