Applications open for one-way trip to Mars: Mission calls for couple willing to be cooped up together on 501 day trip Over 10,000 people have already applied - despite the process not being officially announced until today The private, nonprofit project, called Inspiration Mars, will get initial money from multimillionaire investment consultant Dennis Tito, the first space tourist, and will cost more than $1 billion It aims to establish a colony on the red planet by 2023 By James Nye and Mark Prigg Applications are set to open today for a mission that could send the first humans to the red planet. Those chosen for the 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. 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 The organisation says: Applicants need to be at least 18 years of age, have a deep sense of purpose, willingness to build and maintain healthy relationships, the capacity for self-reflection and ability to trust. They must be resilient, adaptable, curious, creative and resourceful. Mars One is not seeking specific skill sets such as medical doctors, pilots or geologists. Rather, candidates will receive a minimum of eight years' extensive training while employed by Mars One. While any formal education or real-world experience can be an asset, all skills required on Mars will be learned while in training. You can apply here. Nevertheless, the project has already had 10,000 applicants, even though it did not officially start accepting them until today. When the official search is launched today 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 that 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 5th 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. American multimillionaire Dennis Tito, (left), gestures shortly after his landing from the ISS as the first space tourist and (right) 12 years later speaking about his Martian project which he launched today Surface of Mars, taken by Viking 1 in 1975 - This is the closest that the married astronauts would ever get to the Martian surface on the proposed 2018 mission 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. A previous Nasa study is believed to be the inspiration for the plan - showing walls lined with storage space and water 'Dehydrate them as much as possible, because we need to get the water back,' he said. Those solid waste products get put into a bag, put right back against the wall. Tito is working to a deadline tighter than the one President Kennedy gave to NASA in 1961 to have a man on the moon and back again by the end of the decade. That is because January 2018 is the last time for almost another 15 years that Mars comes closest to the Earth. The planets realign every 15 years, and who wants to wait for 2031? Tito said today at a press conference in Washington D.C. By that time, we might have company. The planned mission will use a rocket supplied by Space X - the proposed Falcon Heavy lift rocket which will take the Martian module into space This view of the rising earth greeted astronauts Borman, Anders and Lovell as they came from behind the moon after the lunar orbit insertion burn during Apollo 8 moon flight in 1968 - the married Mars couple will go further than anyone has been before Despite the fact that the spacecraft would not be landing humans on Mars, it would bring them 100 miles above the planet's surface - which would represent the first time in human spaceflight that a private company accomplished something a government was unable to do in space. Tito began planning the expedition after his return from the International Space Station in 2001 and is reported to be willing to invest as much as $100 million of his personal fortune into the venture. 'There is no time to lose,' he said today reported the Wall Street Journal. Now is the time. Round Trip to Mars? The Dangers any Couple will Have to Brave on Their Journey Even with radiation shielding in place, the round trip to Mars is likely to involve massive exposure levels from charged particles. Out in deep space, the crew of a 500-day trip would be exposed to total radiation roughly equal to the dose an astronaut that flew five or six times to the ISS would expect to receive over their career. Long-term weightlessness, including bone loss and muscle loss. The couple who fly past Mars will surpass Soviet cosmonaut Valery Polyakov's 437-day record for continuous time in microgravity, set in 1994-1995 aboard the Russian space station Mir. The sleeping quarters will be shielded against the danger of a solar storm erupting from the sun - sending radiation to unbearable levels. The mental stresses on the human mind are also untested in the reality of deep space - to date extreme isolation has only been experienced by overwinter crews in Antarctica There will be no backup plan to rescue the astronauts if something goes wrong - they will be alone in the night 75 million miles away from Earth The couple will have to ration about 3,000 pounds of dehydrated food they'll have to rehydrate with the same water they drank and turned to waste two days ago Keith Cowing, editor of the NasaWatch website, said: 'Unlike the spate of space commerce companies that have flashed on and off the news in recent months, this effort has substantial cash behind it - at the onset. That fact alone moves this idea from giggle factor to the verge of credibility. The planned trajectory of the space craft is known as a 'free return', which means that once the Mars mission and its astronauts leaves on its mission, it will swing around Mars using the planet's gravity to return - no matter what happens to the married couple aboard. Unlike any NASA human space mission, there will be no backup plan to rescue the astronauts if something goes wrong. The sobering reality is that even when it's close to Earth, Mars is more than 75 million miles away. 'Many people have told us this is the kind of daring idea that America used to excel at, but they say we don't do it anymore because of the risk,' said Taber MacCallum, the chief technical officer for Inspiration Mars and with his wife Jane Poynter, one of the potential married candidates. He is CEO and co-founder of Paragon Space Development Corporation reports National Geographic, which specializes in creating life-support systems for extreme environments. 'We are going to make the capsule and mission as safe as humanly possible, but it will undeniably carry more risk than what's come before,' he said to National Geographic. As we see it, this is the way forward. MacCallum is well aware of the psychological stress of being in such a tiny environment with only one other person for company. He lived in the Biosphere 2, a closed environment outside Tucson, Arizona, for two years in the 1990s. Much of that time was spent with the woman who later became his wife, Jane Poynter. The 501-day flight would be used by scientists to pioneer technologies to shield humans from the massive radiation which exists in deep space and demonstrate that human beings can exist in confined spaces for long durations. The longest any human has stayed in space so far is about 13 months, held by a Russian cosmonaut. Mars500: In 2011 after a 520-day simulation of a flight to Mars, in Moscow, Russia the all-male crew of three Russians, a Frenchman, a Colombian and a Chinese successfully completed the experiment intended to simulate isolating conditions Tito himself won't be flying on this mission he announced: 'I will not be one of the crew members. And if I were 30 years younger, I still would not be. 'The reason this entire thing is possible is because it's actually a very simple mission,' said Jane Poynter to Wired Magazine. 'We're not trying to land, we're going to fly by and we're using extant technologies that NASA and the space industry have been developing for years.' The number one danger for any crew is expected to be the radiation - with charged particles streaming from the sun, galactic cosmic rays or even from distant stars. While humans on Earth are protected by our magnetic field, which also umbrella's the International Space Station, the married crew would be exposed to radiation which would alter DNA and lower blodd cell counts. The effect was likened by MacCallum to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. VIDEO Fancy a trip to Mars? Now taking applications... Taber MacCallum and his wife, Jane Poynter, are part of the planning team for a mission to Mars in 2018. They're also potential candidates to take the trip In addition to radiation, problems would be encountered with muscle and bone deterioration which happens during extended time in zero gravity. The biggest problem though would be the crew - who would be expected to spend all their time together, putting a huge strain on them psychologically. The Mars500 experiment run out of out Russia, where a crew of six simulated the length of time it would take to arrive, land and return to Mars in isolation succeeded. Although the volunteers knew they could just leave if the strain became too much as they were still on Earth. 'It's a risk well worth taking,' MacCallum said. He said it harkens back to the days when people took risks when it was meaningful, and he said it could be an inspiration, especially to students. As for why a couple will make the flight, 'this is very symbolic and we really need it to represent humanity with a man and a woman,' MacCallum said. New frontier? Man has not returned to the moon since 1972 and still has come no further to landing on another planet in the 40 years since the Apollo lunar programs finished. He said if it is a man and a woman on such a long, close-quarters voyage, it makes sense for them to be married so that they can give each other the emotional support that will probably need when they look out the window and see Earth get smaller and more distant: 'If that's not scary, I don't know what is.' The project aims to capitalize on the once-in-a-generation close approach of the two planets' orbits. The timeline for the 501-day mission is set out in a technical paper to be presented next month at a scientific meeting. It calls for a launch on Jan. 5, 2018, a Mars flyby on Aug. 20, 2018, and a return to Earth on May 21, 2019. In a statement, NASA spokesman David Steitz said the venture validates President Barack Obama's decision to rely more on private sector ingenuity to explore space, and is 'a testament to the audacity of America's commercial aerospace industry and the adventurous spirit of America's citizen-explorers.' He said 'NASA will continue discussions with Inspiration Mars to see how the agency might collaborate on mutually beneficial activities.' Stanford University professor Scott Hubbard, NASA's former Mars mission chief, said that the team's technical paper is 'long on inspiration, short on technical details. What is there is correct. 'It's sort of an audacious thing to say, 'I'm going to fly by Mars in five years," said MacCallum, who was part of a team that lived for two years in Biosphere 2, a sort of giant terrarium on Earth that was supposed to replicate a mission on another planet. ***