According to reports, millionaire Dennis Tito and his Inspiration Mars Foundation will announce a plan this week to send two people on a 501-day trip around Mars, possibly in a modified SpaceX Dragon capsule launched by a Falcon Heavy rocket. The crew would neither land on Mars nor go into Martian orbit-- the ship would simply loop around Mars and come back to Earth. Launch target for the flight is January, 2018.
Tito, of course, was the first paying space tourist on ISS.
Five hundred days in a tiny capsule with one other person, of course, would be wildly different from Tito's eight-day experience on the comparatively spacious station. The "plan," indeed, seems a bit more like a publicity grab. We will see.
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