Other than that--piece a cake!
Ha-ha.
Really, though, will the married couple be required to be an infertile couple?
if it were MY project, I certainly wouldn't want to risk pregnancy/birth on such a perilous mission and I don't think there is any birth control that is 100% effective. So it would have to be a couple who had chosen infertility (done the surgery) or were naturally 100% infertile with no chance of surprises.
As to logistics and hazards, a whole lot of folks have done a whole of thinking and experimentation on extended space travel and I have considerable confidence that known problems can be solved by then. And if major logistics/hazards problems aren't solved by then, they wouldn't likely go--the mission would likely be postponed.
But "privatized" space missions--especially one of this magnitude (and danger)--do present several big problems, one of them being lack of public accountability. What if the private entity LIES to the astronauts--say, about the safety of the anti-radiation solution--and launches them with inadequate protection without telling them the truth? Though government secrecy is also a problem, there are mechanisms for requiring scientific fact and truth at NASA, and a particular history at NASA that has strengthened the whistleblowing culture. NASA has extensive experience with this--a private entity not so much (or at all) and a private entity would have lots of private motives to do such a thing--to cut corners, to lie, to withhold evidence, to risk their people unnecessarily, etc.
Also, what if these astronauts get into serious trouble at a point in their mission at which NASA intervention is possible? The pressure would be enormous to spend billions and billions of dollars to rescue them, if at all possible--and, kind of like the bankster bailout, "we the people" would likely foot the bill, without having had any say--ourselves, or through our representatives in government or through government science programs such as NASA, as to the design or desirability of this mission. We would be "stuck" with it, in other words--two human beings in trouble out there in space; how could we NOT try to rescue them, if rescue was even remotely possible? Even if NASA couldn't get to them, NASA and government decision-makers would be under tremendous pressure to throw all of NASA's resources into solving whatever life-threatening problems the mission has run into.
This is kind of like Monsanto or chemical corporations messing with our food supply--causing loss of biodiversity or bee die-off's--or the profiteers of the nuclear power industry pushing the dire cleanup, storage and disaster costs off on "we the people"--and other such instances (many--the biggest one being climate change) of private entities endangering us all, endangering the very web of life on Earth--and who is footing, and will foot, the bill? We let private entities run rampant--we let them LIE to us time and again--and then we pay for it, one way or another.
I AM ALL FOR SPACE TRAVEL. I think we should have had human beings on Mars long ago--and I think we SHOULD be pouring massive resources into space exploration, to develop revolutionary technologies (such as warp drive--NASA has a warp drive project but it is just getting started), to populate our own solar system and beyond. I really truly believe that this is our destiny and in addition believe that it would transform our society for the good. People who say, "Let's solve poverty first," or "let's solve war first," or "let's save our planet first," are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Widen our society's perspective to the solar system and beyond and THEN people start organizing themselves with "big picture" goals and inspiration, and demand that government respond to ALL problems in this way: for the greater good.
Private entities still might have considerable roles to play in such a motivated, inspired society--but I think that this project may also be wrong way round. Human travel to Mars shouldn't be starting with a private entity that has little or no public accountability. They should be fitting into a bigger PUBLIC program that includes accountability as a requirement of participation.
Previous explorations (of our own planet)--as mentioned above--are interesting as precedents but they provide little guidance for us, now, in the 21st century, with all that has happened since--the development of democracy, the enormous, and exceedingly fast-paced advances in science, technology and communications, and, perhaps, most important of all, our new understanding of the sheet ENORMITY of the Universe. It is only since the late 1960s and that iconic photo of Earth from the Moon that most of us have begun to perceive our planet in its natural state as ONE--as indivisible, without borders, with no racial or national divides. It is only LATELY that we, as the conscious inhabitants of Earth, have begun to understand what that means--that a butterfly landing in China really does cause hurricanes a half a planet away in Nicaragua, and that our uses of fossil fuels and cattle are melting the polar ice caps.
NO earlier explorers had anything like this new and revolutionary perspective--brave as they might have been, visionary as they might have been. Those were baby steps compared to what we are thinking about NOW. We share their impulse to explore. It's in our DNA. And we can learn some things from them--for instance, what NOT to do if we discover off-planet life and off-planet conscious life (the Prime Directive of Star Trek, which was based on past horrors--genocide, slavery, ego-centric domination and interference, vast exploitation of peoples, vast damage to ecologies). But there the lessons end, and humanity's true place in the Universe begins. We are living through an entirely unprecedented era of astronomical understanding and technological development. We have no guides.
What are the hazards of a private entity taking such a huge step as this--sending human beings to circle Mars? i've mentioned a few--but really it baffles me. It also aggravates me that our government is so lacking in vision, and so egregiously corrupt, that even our vote counting has been privatized and put beyond public control. How can the best ideas "rise to the top" as they should be doing in a democracy, with so much pettiness and greed blockading our aspirations as a people?
This is the RESULT of so much pettiness, greed and corruption--that a mission that NASA should be leading devolves to a private billionaire. I have no ill feeling towards him or his team, and I wish them every success with all my heart. But I think it's wrong. It's not their fault that it's wrong. But it's wrong. We should not permit space travel to be a private game. Just as we learned that space projects must be, and are bound to be, international--that the U.S. has no proprietary right to space--we need to learn that private interests in space travel must be subjected to PUBLIC control and scrutiny and that this--the grandest human adventure of all--must be a PUBLIC project led by a PUBLIC agency for the common good--for the expansion of "the Commons" to the Universe. Space--that enormity--must be COMMON space, NOT private space.
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