Billionaire Dennis Tito, tired of being told that we can't send humans to Mars yet, on Wednesday revealed his plan for launching two astronauts to the red planet as early as December 2017.
Dubbed "Inspiration Mars," the flyby mission would exploit a rare alignment of Earth and Mars that minimizes the time and the fuel it would take to get to Mars and back home again. The astronauts would come within 160 km of the Martian surface before being slung back to Earth.
"It would be a voyage of around 800 million miles (1.3 billion km) around the sun in 501 days," Tito testified Wednesday at a hearing of the House subcommittee on space. "No longer is a Mars flyby mission just one more theoretical idea. It can be done. Not in a matter of decades, but in a few years."