Space Tourist Dennis Tito Wants Older Couple for Mars Mission

A wealthy investors and a space tourist plan to send an older couple on a privately funded mission scheduled for 2018.

The Inspiration Mars Foundation and Dennis Tito, an American engineer known for being the first space tourist, are still collecting funds for the one-and-a-half year mission that would send a spacecraft to Mars and back but say they do have an idea of who the ideal passengers should be: a older male and female couple that have a tested relationship.

BBC News reports that scientists affiliated with the project say an older couple that has a well developed relationship may be the most suited to withstand the psychological hardships of living in a small space shuttle for such a long trip.

Jane Poynter, who is involved in the Mars project and has previously spent two years locked inside a sealed ecosystem with seven other researchers, says the relationship among the two crew members are key to the success of the mission.

"I can attest from personal experience from living in Biosphere 2 that having somebody that you really deeply trusted and cared for was an extraordinary thing to have," Ms Poynter told BBC News. Poynter married one of the researchers from the Biosphere project.

Shed added that the mission will be a challenge and that mission planners are hoping to find "resilient people that would be able to maintain a happy upbeat attitude in the face of adversity." The selected crew would be trained for the mission and would be provided with psychological support from mission control on Earth.

NBC News reports that Poynter, 50, and her husband, Taber MacCullan, 48, are among the candidates.

"We'll certainly throw our hat in the ring," said Taber MacCallum, who like his wife has also been working on the Mars project.

But more candidates are expected to surface as the search continues.

 "When we tell people we're proposing to send a man and a woman on a mission to Mars, as a married couple, people line up. ... That chord gets struck over and over again," MacCallum told NBC News.

Prof Christopher Riley, a space historian at Lincoln University, told BBC News that sending a couple on the mission is the right move.

"The idea of sending older astronauts on longer duration missions, after they have had children, has been around for a while. The reasoning is that such a long duration mission, outside of the protective magnetosphere of the Earth, could leave them infertile," he said.