After writing the other day about Dennis Tito’s audacious proposal to send a man and a woman on a Martian fly-by in the year 2018, I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the idea. I think it’s the crystal-clear deadline that really sparks my enthusiasm. Lots of people and organizations talk about sending humans to Mars… someday. Twenty or thirty years from now. It seems like it’s always 20 years out, no matter how much time passes. But much like JFK’s famous Moon speech called for a definite timeframe to make the dream happen, Tito — and more importantly that immutable launch window for the fastest free-return trajectory — has drawn a distinct line in the sand: we go now, or not at all. And the fact that the line is only five years away cranks up the excitement levels. I’d love not to be in a nursing home when human eyes get that near to another planet for the first time.

I’ll tell you how enthused I am about this “Mission for America,” as Tito refers to it: I actually downloaded and read the feasibility study put together by the Inspiration Mars Foundation. For fun. Now, my field of expertise is obviously not anything that remotely resembles engineering, but I am a pretty big space nerd with a good feel for how a lot of this hardware works, and the study was obviously written with the non-rocket scientist in mind, so while certain tables and mathematical chatter flew right over my head, I understood the overall gist of it. And while the study’s authors concede that this was only a preliminary examination, and there are a lot of factors that need to be looked at much more rigorously before such a mission can proceed, the findings are convincing. We could do this. It’d push our current technology right up to the limit, and there’s no question it would be tremendously risky. (For instance, one thing the feasibility study brings up that I’ve never really thought about is is the matter of re-entry. They’re not all the same, you see, and the  planned trajectory for this Mars flight would bring the ship back into Earth’s atmosphere at far greater speeds than any other manned spacecraft has ever reached during re-entry, so the astronauts would experience very high g-loads — after a year-and-a-half of weightlessness, remember — and the heatshield would need to be very beefy. But this isn’t an insurmountable problem, just one that needs very careful planning.) Nevertheless, the study’s authors conclude that the mission is possible, and possible within the timeframe we have available. Using existing, state-of-the-art technology — nothing exotic that has to be designed and built from scratch, but things that are available now, or will be very shortly — we really could send a couple spinning around the backside of fracking Mars and bring them home again.

I’m going to go on the record right now and declare that I think we should do it. Or at least attempt it. And not just because I’m an aging child of the 1970s who grew up on Star Trek and Space: 1999 and legends of  the Apollo program and all the other space-related stuff of that era, and who still yearns to see some part of all that come to fruition (although there is, of course, more than a little truth in that accusation). I think we should try it because I believe this country needs something like this, some crazy, exciting dream that’s bigger than partisan politics, bigger than sports or entertainment media, something that will bring us together and give us all a shot of national pride and something to think about other than how shitty everything has become. It’s been decades since we had that sort of shared cultural experience. And things are so very bad right now. The only other time this country has been so at odds with itself, so divided into tribes that are so completely wary of every thing the other side thinks, says, and does, was on the eve of the Civil War. But a big symbolic “first” — especially one that’s not paid for by taxes the people of this nation no longer want to pay — carried out under the American flag might be just the thing to bring us all together again, at least for a little while.

Of course, the naysayers are already coming out of the woodwork, shouting that Tito is out of his mind, that it’s a scam, that he’ll never get the funding (have I mentioned that this is intended to be an entirely private venture?), or there’s not enough time to put it together, or — most  disheartening of all — that it’s a suicide mission. They’re saying that whatever lucky couple wins the seats aboard the Mars ship will never make back alive. And let’s be honest with ourselves, maybe they won’t. Five hundred days in a tin can going so far out into the void… that’s pretty dangerous. A lot of things could go wrong. But I wonder how many people in Portugal said it was suicide when Columbus announced he was going to sail west toward the very edge of the Earth? Or when some hunter-gatherer on the plains of Africa announced that he — or she, perhaps! — wanted to see what was on the other side of that ridge over there. Look, I’m an old-school Trekkie. I believe, in the immortal words of Captain Kirk, that risk is our business. That it’s worth taking a chance in the name of accomplishing a historic first and pushing back the boundaries of human experience and knowledge just a little bit more.

I have always considered myself an explorer at heart. I believe that that’s the basic nature of the human species, to want to know what’s over the horizon. But we get distracted, especially these days, when there are so many shiny things around us, and so many seemingly insurmountable problems weighing us down. We get caught up in the mundane worries of making of a living and keeping ourselves going on days when it seems like everything in the world wants to grind us into powder. And when that happens, we need an adventure — even if it’s only a vicarious one! — to break us out of our complacent ruts and help us rediscover what we really are. The human species needs to explore… to learn… to just see what’s out there. Robotic proxies can only fill so much of that need. At some point, we’ve got to see it with our own eyes.

I really hope this happens. If Tito asks for public donations, I’ll contribute. And I’ll keep watching for news from the foundation… and I’ll keep my fingers crossed that somehow, against all probability, this actually happens.

(Incidentally, if this venture intrigues you, I recommend this article on how it all came about…)