Applications open for couple

A drawing provided by Inspiration Mars shows an artist's conception of a spacecraft envisioned by the private group, which wants to send a married couple on a mission to fly by the red planet and zip back home, beginning in 2018. Photo: AP

A mission is going to send the first humans to the red planet.
Those chosen for a round trip, which will blast off in 2018, will pave the way for a Mars base in 2023.
They will have to spend 501 days together in cramped conditions - meaning they will probably be a married couple in their 50s who already know they can get on.
Nevertheless, the project has already had 10,000 applicants, even though it did not officially start accepting them until yesterday.
When the official search was launched at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York, they expect tens of thousands more hopefuls to put their names forward.
Multimillionaire space tourist Dennis Tito announced his ambitious and audacious $1 billion plan earlier this year to send a married couple in their 50s on a round-trip visit to Mars in just five years.
Dubbed a “Mission for America”, Tito said the lucky couple have yet to be selected for the journey in which they will spend 501 days confined in a 600-cubic-foot capsule with only each other for company.
Setting his launch date for January 5, 2018, Tito is a former Nasa engineer who made his money through finance and became the first private space tourist in 2001, when he paid the Russians $20 million for a ticket to the International Space Station.
The voyage to Mars and back would be a cosmic no-frills flight that would take the husband-and-wife astronauts as close as 100 miles to the planet, but it would also mean being cooped up for 16 months in a cramped space capsule half the size of an RV.
The spacecraft will pass within 100 miles of Mars' surface, but won't enter orbit or touchdown, because that would require additional propulsion systems
The private, nonprofit project, called Inspiration Mars, will get initial money from multimillionaire investment consultant Dennis Tito.
The team would not say how much the overall flight would cost, but outsiders put it at more than $1billion.
Nasa will not be involved and the trip will be dependent on the planned Falcon Heavy Rockets currently under development by Elon Musk's Space X corporation which will be able to deliver 1,600 pounds of cargo - at a cost of $128 million.
“SpaceX does not have a relationship with the Inspiration Mars Foundation,” said SpaceX spokeswoman Christina Ra to USA Today.
“However, SpaceX is always open to providing a full spectrum of launch services to interested customers.”
Researchers say one of the biggest risks to the mission is radiation from cosmic rays, and have come up with a radical solution to the problem.
They plan to ask the participants to line the walls of their spaceship with water, food - and their own faeces.
“It's a little queasy sounding, but there's no place for that material to go, and it makes great radiation shielding,” Taber MacCallum, a member of the team funded by multimillionaire Dennis Tito, told New Scientist.
He said solid and liquid waste will be used - after it has been dehydrated to remove water for drinking.