Billionaire Dennis Tito, tired of being told that we cannot send humans to Mars yet, revealed his scheme on Wednesday for launching two astronauts to the red planet as early as December 2017.
Dubbed ‘‘Inspiration Mars,’’ the fly-by mission would exploit a rare alignment of Earth and Mars that minimizes the time and the fuel it would take to get to Mars and back. The astronauts would come within 100 miles of the Martian surface before being slung back to Earth.
‘‘It would be a voyage of around 800 million miles around the sun in 501 days,’’ Tito testified Wednesday at a hearing of the House subcommittee on space. ‘‘No longer is a Mars fly-by mission just one more theoretical idea. It can be done. Not in a matter of decades, but in a few years.’’
Grab this opportunity or risk seeing China get to Mars first, the space buff told the members of Congress.
The plan has a lot of moving parts, and would require cooperation from NASA and a great deal of NASA hardware. The agency is building a jumbo rocket, the Space Launch System, that is supposed to be ready for its inaugural, uncrewed test flight in 2017. Tito’s plan essentially borrows the system for the Mars mission.
NASA officials did not immediately respond to Tito’s detailed proposal. In late October, in response to questions on a collaboration by Inspiration Mars and NASA, the agency issued a statement, saying, ‘‘The agency will continue discussions with them to see how NASA might collaborate on mutually-beneficial activities that could complement NASA’s human spaceflight, space technology, and Mars exploration plans. The agency has not made any commitments.’’