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Millionaire Plans Mission To Mars In 2018
littlesparkvt writes in with news about the possibility of a privately funded Mars mission. "Millionaire Dennis Tito became the first paying customer to make a trip to the International Space Station and now he wants to launch a privately funded mission to Mars in 2018. Dennis paid a reported 20 Million to ride aboard a Russian rocket to the International Space Station and has since stayed out of the spotlight, until now. There’s no word whether the trip will include humans, there will be more information on that fact next week. Considering there is little time to train a crew for the mission the flight in 2018 will most likely be an unmanned probe. There’s also a possibility that the first mission to Mars from this private investor will harbor supplies for future astronauts. Plants and food are a possibility as they would take much less space than a full human crew."
From http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/02/21/new-insights-on-that-private-crewed-mars-mission/:
The IEEE Aerospace Conference is in March -- next month. That's pretty interesting timing.
Carousel is a lie!
with a 'b' if he intends to go to and return from Mars.
If Dennis is got the $$$ to float this kind of a plan, why the hell doesn't he get onboard with the Mars-One group? They actually have a pretty fleshed-out plan to put human colonists on Mars starting in 2023. They could really use a large influx of $$$ to get their plan going.. From what I've read, they have it pretty well planned out to send the first 4 colonists to Mars in 2023, but still need a lot more sponsors/funding...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Did anyone else do a double take reading the headline?
The Mars One people have no intention to bring anyone home. Presumably Tito wants his ass back on the Earth someday.
This is a farce anyway. Tito's net worth is more than a full order of magnitude too small for even the cheapest conceviable Mars mission.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Please change this planets name to Urectum to avoid all the stupid jokes like this one.
What's his net worth? I found something quoting $200 million, which would be well short of the cost of even an unmanned Mars mission. He'll have to get other investors.
Lots of other investors.
And why would you invest billions for an unmanned mission, which has already been done several times? This sounds an awful lot like someone with a big ego and some money to waste.
He really needs to read this before spending any money.
We took 8 years to go from never having launched a man in a rocket to landing them on the moon and bringing them back safely. Although the scope of this mission is a lot bigger, we are also clued up on many aspects of space travel we had no idea about back then. 5 years is *ample* time to train a crew.
While they have restricted access to the paper that describes how they are going to do this, what Tito is going to do has already been revealed. Most of the sentences in the summary are wrong. Yes the mission will include humans. No it will not be bringing anything beyond what is required to keep the astronaut(s) alive. Astronaut training? You could fly this mission yourself tomorrow if you had the dedication and the planets were aligned. Which they aren't, and won't be until 2018. Word is that this will be a single launch of a Falcon Heavy with a Dragon capsule. Hardware cost could be less than $200 million.
The mission will fly by Mars but not orbit or land on it. Round trip will be roughly 500 days. Crew activities will involve posting photos of themselves with Mars in the background to Facebook, eating space food, and playing lots and lots of Angry Birds. It is possible that a flyby of Venus could be in the mission plan as well. If and when they return to Earth they will not be able to walk again without significant physical therapy and they will be known as the biggest bad-asses in the Solar System.
...will harbor supplies
I'm wondering who they'd have to harbor these [presumably innocent] fugitive supplies from...
With this millionaire and the Mars One group planning a trip in 2023, has anybody thought of the contamination this might cause.
NASA and space agencies around the world have been trying to find life, or evidence life once existed, on Mars for years. If we have several independent groups landing their own spacecraft, is there a chance they might careless contaminate Mars with Earth microbes, thus throwing any future findings into question?
What's his net worth? I found something quoting $200 million, which would be well short of the cost of even an unmanned Mars mission. He'll have to get other investors.
I'm pretty sure that really depends on who he's going to have build the equipment, and whether he's willing to do it in a country which will happily ignore patent licensing.
The DC-X was completed in 21 months by a team of 100 people, at a cost of around 60 million in 1991 dollars. That'd be ~$100M today, assuming we learned exactly zilch from the first one. If he's willing to build SSTO vehicles, and he's willing to cut some corners based on what was already learned in previous research, and he's willing to go to a non-US friendly country who won't cooperate on preventing it, the costs go down.
Venezuela could be a candidate, and so could a couple of the former Soviet Republics. A DC-X with a patent-ignoring linear aerospike engine would likely be a pretty sweet vehicle. If he's willing to sell launch services on the things for a while, he could probably raise any additional funding rather quickly. If he's willing to sell completed spacecraft to anyone who wanted to buy one at a hefty markup, he could probably do it even faster.
It's not that far outside the realm of possibility for someone with 1/5th of a billion dollars to consider. Especially if you consider that launch costs have been pretty intentionally inflated up to this point.
Mars-one really is not that well thought out or fleshed out. In fact, I doubt that it will ever get off the ground. The fact that they want to use dragons to live in indicates that they will NEVER be taken seriously. Any plan that has ppl living on the surface will NEVER work. Not only do you have meteorites, BUT, you have large amounts of radiation. As such, unless you live underground, you will have a short life. In addition, they want the trans-habitat unit to be from thales. IOW, they want a unit from the ISS and europe. OK, except that once out of earth's orbit, you will have LARGE amounts of scatter radiation due to the metal. When Boeing/NASA built the first units, it was KNOWN that this was in LEO and therefore under earth protection. Once you get past our magnashere, that is gone. Unless you have small magnetic shielding, OR, you use something that does not produce scatter, then you doom the crew to short lives. Bigelow has the best approach on this and yet, Mars-one appears to be more interested in using local companies over what is safest.
What Tito wants is to show that we can send a crew to mars and back. We did that with Apollo, which makes sense. However, I would rather go to an asteroid that is say 1-2 months away and then come back after a week stay. That would prove the equipment, while giving us an opportunity to deal with light G work. This would actually make it possible to put a BA-330 on Phobos. That could then be used as an emergency base, but also as a launch point from/to the the martian surface.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Interesting... this actually sounds possible. Although, Elon Musk himself said you wouldn't want to go to Mars in a Dragon. The astronauts would have to spend over a year in a small capsule, and Musk figured if someone did that they'd likely come back insane, if at all.
From http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/02/21/new-insights-on-that-private-crewed-mars-mission/:
Right. Tell your kids: "let's go to McDonalds!" Load them up in the car. Drive to McD's, just drive past it, return home. Let's see how well that goes does for "going to McDonalds".
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
If that's accurate then either he's putting it forward as an "earliest possible" estimate to build hype, or he sorely overestimates people's ability to put up with bare minimum living conditions.
I do not think that the crew would be psychologically capable of performing mission-critical functions outside of the first month. Spam in a can.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?