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Cape Ibrium, Luna, 17 March 2171 – The IonGen Corporation announced today the long-anticipated launch of the first manned mission to Mars. The mission has been in the planning stage for several decades, and though long plagued by numerous delays, is finally scheduled to torch off from the LaGrange-Hallstadt orbital facility on 20 July. That date in commemoration of the first lunar landing 202 years ago in 1969.

The mission is the brainchild of IonGen founder and CEO, Terrence McCann-Wen, the eccentric genius who perfected the ion-pulse rocket engines that will power the manned Mars craft on its journey to the Red Planet.

McCann-Wen has been the object of ridicule and scorn in the media for decades, and come under intense government scrutiny at times concerning his seeming obsession with a manned mission to Mars. But McCann-Wen has persevered in the face of that ridicule and mockery, wholly financing the mission from his own personal fortune.

When McCann-Wen unveiled the Mars craft at IonGen’s LaGrange-Hallstadt factory last year, he officially named the ship Rosinanté after the horse ridden by the famous fictional character, Don Quixote, and by so doing threw his success back into the faces of numerous media critics who called his dedication to a manned Mars mission a “quixotic obsession.”

While some in the scientific community question the timing of the Rosinanté’s launch date, which does not coincide with the closest orbital approach for the Earth-Mars passage, IonGen spokesmen dismiss these questions, claiming that the calculations of the passage are based upon outmoded chemical rocket technology, and not a concern with the ion-pulse technology that is at the core of the new ship’s propulsion system.

The passage to Mars is expected to take 6 months, and the 15 person crew, who’s identities remain a closely guarded secret, will live and work aboard the Rosinanté’s habitat torus, which is spun during ship transit to provide artificial gravity for the crew through centrifugal force.

Once arriving in orbit around Mars, six crew members will disembark aboard a specially designed atmospheric shuttle and land on the surface of Mars near the region of Cydonia, where the famous “face on Mars” is located. The crew will then construct a habitat on the surface using materials and supplies pre-positioned through a series of previous missions.

When asked for a statement concerning the privately-funded Mars mission, a spokesman from the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs refused to comment officially, but did wish the IonGen team Godspeed on their journey.