So much for being space cowboys. Dennis Tito, the multi-millionaire behind what was to be the first privately funded mission to Mars, has just knocked on NASA's door asking for help. The development is a wake-up call to the most idealistic dreamers of the private spaceflight industry.
"They can't do it all by themselves, particularly this kind of ambitious mission," says John Logsdon, formerly of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington DC. "It's a recognition of reality."
Tito's not-for-profit mission, called Inspiration Mars
, was initially supposed to use entirely private or commercial vehicles to launch a pair of astronauts into Earth orbit in early 2018. The crew would take advantage of the planets' fortuitously close orbits at that time to take a 501-day journey around Mars and back home, without landing on the Red Planet's surface.
But a new architecture study report released on 20 November concluded that the plan could not work without NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), a heavy lift vehicle that is still in development but should be ready to take humans into space by 2021.
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