It's been more than 40 years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's walk on the moon turned the world's imagination to space exploration. Predictions mankind would soon be stepping onto Mars have languished. But that may be about to change.

NASA officials have confirmed that studies are being conducted to assess whether astronauts can be sent on a one-way mission to the Red Planet.

So far, the mission amounts to US$1.1 million in seed capital that NASA's Ames Research Centre and the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency hope to turn into the $11 billion the mission could cost.

Ames Director Simon Worden confirmed the studies at the Long Now Foundation's "Long Conversation" conference in San Francisco last weekend.

"We hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund. The human space programme is now really aimed at settling other worlds. Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired," Worden said in remarks posted to a blog that covered the event.

"Within a few years we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds."

Worden's admission offered few details beyond a possible 2030 launch date, but its coincidence with a new paper published in the Journal of Cosmology suggests how such a mission might look.

In their paper "To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars," Washington State University geobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Arizona State University cosmologist Paul Davies suggest a one-way trip sidesteps the potentially prohibitive costs involved.

"Eliminating the need for returning early colonists would cut the costs several fold and at the same time ensure a continuous commitment to the exploration of Mars and space in general," they write.

Although he's excited by the prospect of manned space exploration, space educator Randy Attwood says the promise of landing astronauts on Mars is far from new.

"Ever since the Moon landing, Mars has always been 20 years away. It's sort of like this carrot on a stick," Attwood told CTV's Canada AM.

"There's a lot of technology they have to overcome before going to Mars," he added. "It's a very harsh environment."

Mars has an average surface temperature of -63C, an atmosphere composed mainly of carbon dioxide, and because there is no magnetic field it's not protected from solar radiation. Plus, the planet can be up to 399 million kilometres from Earth depending on where the planets are in their orbits -- making a one-way journey there a nine-month prospect.

Attwood says that, given enough money, there's a good chance researchers can solve the technological problems. But that still doesn't mean the mission's a go.

"If there were people getting on a spaceship tomorrow to go to Mars on a one-way trip, I'm not sure the government and society would let them go," Attwood said, explaining that NASA has grown extremely cautious since the loss of the shuttles Challenger and Columbia and their crews.

Any disaster on a Mars-bound mission would likely put an end to plans for colonizing space, Attwood said.

"The people running Apollo, they were concerned that if two astronauts actually lost their lives on the Moon, then everyone when they looked up at the Moon, forever, would know there were two dead astronauts up there and it would have stopped all human exploration."

Nevertheless, Davies and Schulze-Makuch argue that a series of successful missions to Mars could eventually lead to long-term colonization of Earth's second-closest planetary neighbour.

"One approach could be to send four astronauts initially, two on each of two space craft, each with a lander and sufficient supplies, to stake a single outpost on Mars," they write. Additional supplies could be sent from Earth every two years afterwards.

Money remains the primary obstacle, however, hence Worden's focus on sympathetic billionaires.

"(Google cofounder) Larry Page asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, ‘Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?' So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price," Worden said.

In the meantime, those with a spirit for adventure can start dreaming of what to pack.

Attwood says ideal candidates would be "willing to take a chance to see what's on the other side."

"You need people who are skilled. So you're going to have to have a mixture of 'right stuff' type people and people who want to explore."