An artist's vision of the Inspiration Mars capsule passing by Mars. (Inspiration Mars Foundation/Flickr)

The Inspiration Mars Project, a non-profit organization headed by the world's first ever space tourist, Dennis Tito, revealed how it plans to send two astronauts to the Red Planet and back on Wednesday after initially releasing their plans for a Mars mission in February. The plan involves a 501-day long return journey after cruising within 100 miles of Mars, lifting off in early 2018 and landing back on Earth in May 2019.

Skepticism remains as to whether such a lofty goal can be achieved in just 6 years - especially considering it took NASA more than 5 years to reach the moon at a time when 4% of the federal budget went to the agency in the mid-1960s, and 10 years for Elon Musk's SpaceX to get to the International Space Station alone.

Taber MacCallum, the CTO at Inspiration Mars was quoted as saying to reporters –

"There'll be a lot of science return and techology return. We will, I think, sort of break the sound barrier for going to Mars and back, enabling a range of missions to occur in the future".

He also said that NASA officials have already shown interest and provided substantial support to the project.

Dennis Tito, the multimillionaire entrepreneur from Queens, NYC who paid a reported $20 million to spend a week in space in 2001 on the Soyuz TM-32, said at the Inspiration Mars press conference back in February -

"We've not sent humans beyond the moon in 40 years… and I think it's time to put an end to that lapse".

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