Last week, the story leaked that space tourist and 9-figure rich guy Dennis Tito was planning to launch a manned Mars flyby in 2018. Today, he held a press conference where he laid out his plans and the work already undertaken in greater detail. From my take on it, there was both good news and bad news for the likelihood of this mission occurring.
To be clear, I haven't seen the press conference personally - it's not available on Youtube yet or on the Inspiration Mars foundation's website, nor do I know if they intend to make video of the conference public at some point. I am operating on second-hand reports, albeit ones I consider credible.
So, as is customary, let's start out with the good news:
First, the paper setting forth the plan for the mission, titled Feasibility Analysis for a Manned Mars Free-Return Mission in 2018, is now available (PDF):
http://inspirationmars.org/...
Among the most interesting tidbits are this:
1. The study lists as participants people from SpaceX, NASA Ames Research Center, the Baylor College of Medicine Center for Space Medicine, and Paragon Space Development Corporation - a developer of space environmental life support systems. This does not indicate institutional support for the mission, but clearly shows the credibility of individuals who are helping with its planning.
2. The flyby would zoom by a mere few hundred kilometers above the Martian surface - an altitude similar to where astronauts today orbit the Earth.
3. After the Mars flyby, the spacecraft passes near to the orbit of Venus on the return leg, but Venus would not be nearby at this time. Despite missing a second planetary flyby, this could provide useful data about a potential future manned flyby of Venus.
4. The spacecraft would spend about 10 hours within 100,000 km of Mars.
5. One of the biggest technical challenges would actually be reentering Earth's atmosphere - something the field has decades of experience with. But since the capsule would be traveling at unprecedented speeds, there have to be novel approaches to slowing it down, such as making multiple shallow passes through the atmosphere to slow down before finally reentering, and possibly augmentations to existing heat shields. Upwards of 10 days could be added to the mission if a slower, lower-g reentry is chosen, but a quick reentry would entail very high g-forces.
6. The two-crewmember figure cited in the plan is not arbitrary, but was rather a result of extensive logistics and life support studies showing two to be optimum.
7. No EVAs and no pressure suits. Any maintenance would have to be handled remotely from inside the ship. Additional air is stored to make up for leaks, but catastrophic loss of pressure would doom the crew. This is considered an acceptable risk that will have to be rigorously designed against.
8. Cites "new technologies" for atmospheric recovery that are available to preclude the need to vent polluted atmosphere after a fire.
9. Will seek to minimize use of technologies requiring additional development in order to head off delays.
10. Sets target for life support hardware completion of February 2016.
11. Male + female crew, preferably emotionally bonded. Tito will not be on the crew. Crew will go through a selection process that involves a full mission-duration analog on Earth. At the press conference, it was suggested that married couples would be sought. Even if the mission never happens, the crew selection and training would be a fascinating thing to watch unfold.
12. NASA should play an informative role both for this mission and in general for others like it on whatever scale, but not attempt to impose its institutional values and priorities.
13. All future manned Mars missions would benefit from the work done on life support, radiation shielding, crew dynamics, and the high-speed reentry systems.
14. After rigorous analysis, mission is found to be "feasible" and have no "showstoppers" either technical or financial - i.e., nothing that places the mission outside the realm of practicality.
15. Not a commercial project. No money is intended to be made, just spent for the good of all. However, will seek revenue streams to defray costs - e.g., selling data, media rights, and so on.
16. Paragon is contracted to build a life support prototype, and envisions a capsule attached to an inflatable module with 1200 cubic feet of volume, half for living space.
17. Will tailor radiation mitigation approaches to the individual bodies of the crew.
18. No practical abort once launch for Mars. Fully dedicated. The mission either succeeds or the crew dies.
19. Not yet committing to specific rocket and spacecraft. Falcon Heavy / Dragon was just one scenario.
20. Life support technology is seen as the primary technological challenge, not the rocket or the spacecraft itself.
21. Believe can keep total crew radiation exposure beneath NASA career exposure limits.
22. Crew will be American.
23. Not sure about ultimate cost, but believed to be less than an unmanned NASA probe to Mars.
24. Chance of success estimated at 99%, but willing to take risk of losing crew because that's the only way forward. Cites polar expeditions as cases where people have been lost, even in recent years.
The good news, then, is that my confidence in the technical side of the plan is now ironclad. Here's the bad news:
25. The closest approach is on the night side of Mars, meaning its flyby views would be only partly in daylight and then pitch black as it zooms past (except perhaps for infrared and radio instruments).
26. Tito doesn't have nearly all the money it would cost, so will have to raise it.
27. Tito has committed to fully personally fund the project for two years and up to $100 million, but that may only be 10% - 20% of the total cost, and the launch date is five years away.
28. The 501-day free return trajectories only occur about once every 15 years. The interim alternative missions are mainly 2.5 to 3.5 years long just for a flyby (a landing would be even longer and vastly more expensive) and thus not currently practical for a private mission.
In other words, he may have to raise ten times as much money as he is personally willing to put into it, and do so a lot more quickly than two years if the mission is to occur. Taking that into account, even with the impeccable technical profile, I have to move my assessment of the mission's likelihood of being launched into the "less-than-likely" column. But on yet another hand, the good news within the bad news is that...
29. Whether or not an actual mission happens, $100 million invested into bold human spaceflight development and associated public engagement is massive, and would have major, cascading stimulative effects on the entire field.
In other words, there is no downside whatsoever to this project, as long as it is managed with some level of competence. Either a man and woman get sent to Mars in January 2018, or at least the infrastructure for human flyby exploration of the inner solar system takes a big step forward over the next few years for missions - either later on or toward humbler targets like the Moon or Venus. So, despite my pessimism about the mission itself occurring, the whole thing adds up to a BFD.