Interesting concept, having the astronauts be paid ticket-holders.
Could work.
But not a word about the radiation exposure. Twelve-month round trip in space. Eighteen months on Mars. That’s 30 months of hard radiation... a lot harder than on ISS.
Of course, you could mitigate that by living underground on Mars part of the time. But still. It’s a lot of radiation.
That’s why I’m a big fan of propulsion and shielding research.
I wonder how effective it would be to mix some kind of powdered lead into the foam that inflates the Bigelow modules?
When VASIMIR, a plasma rocket engine, gets perfected it could get the travel time to Mars down to about 39 days. There is a prototype of VASIMIR that is supposed to be tested on the ISS pretty soon.