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  1. Science & Tech
28 February 2013

Wanted: One couple, extremely confident in their love for each other, to go to Mars

Dennis Tito wants to give you the trip of a lifetime.

By Alex Hern

How much do you love your partner? Enough to move in with them? To a house with just under 17 cubic meters of space? And then not leave that house for just over 500 days straight? While drinking your own recycled urine?

If you do, you’re odd. But, you may be able to find gainful employment on a spacecraft to Mars. The New Scientist reports:

This week the Inspiration Mars Foundation, a newly formed non-profit organisation, announced plans for a mission to Mars launching on 5 January 2018 and arriving at the planet in August of that year. Dennis Tito, who in 2001 became the first space tourist to visit the International Space Station, heads the foundation. The trip will be funded primarily by philanthropic donations – but Tito has committed to personally covering the first two years of mission development, no matter how much it costs.

“This is not a commercial mission,” Tito said at a press conference on 27 February in Washington DC. “Let me guarantee you, I will come out to be a lot poorer as a result of this mission. But my grandchildren will come out to be a lot wealthier through the inspiration that this will give them.”

Orbital trajectories shared on Twitter by team member Michael Loucks show plans for a spacecraft to leave Earth, fly past Mars and then come home – all within 501 days. The craft will pass over Mars at a distance of about 160 kilometres carrying a two-person crew, probably a married man and woman who will be paid to make the trip.

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I’m hoping the specificity of “married man and woman” is an overreach on the part of the New Scientist, because that would be excluding all the wannabe astronauts who are unmarried or in same sex relationships. Hell, you could probably make the case that there should be a requirement that the explorers be a couple of the same sex. Because 501 days is considerably longer than nine months, and the one thing you don’t want any chance of is space babies.

(Kidding, space babies would be awesome, but re-entry would be pretty tricky. An infertile couple could also work, of course.)

The full New Scientist piece makes clear that the trip is no easy task. Even ignoring the psychological troubles of being cooped up with someone you love(d) for almost 18 months, there’s radiation, piloting, and then a ten-day orbital deceleration to deal with. And if you pull all of that off, you still don’t get to actually go to Mars—just circle it from space. It’s like that time a friend of mine was refused entry into the USA because they didn’t have the right visa, only, I’d imagine, considerably more annoying.

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