Researchers practice collecting rocks outside the Mars Desert Research Station near Hanksville, Utah.

Millionaire entrepreneur Dennis Tito got space enthusiasts excited last month when he announced a project to fly a married couple around Mars in 2018but NASA may have passed on a similar mission when it was proposed in the late 1990s by a prominent aerospace engineer.

According to Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and a prominent advocate for exploration of the red planet, he had meetings with former NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the late 1990s to pitch him a nearly identical mission to Tito's that would have launched in 2001 and cost the agency about $2 billion.

Dubbed Athena, the mission would have used technology that existed in 1996 on a two-year Mars flyby mission. Two astronauts would have orbited the planet for about a year, remotely-controlling rovers on the Martian surface with about 100 times less lag time than rovers controlled from Earth. The spaceship would never land on Mars, which Zubrin contends was Goldin's problem with the mission.

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"He passed on ithe said if we go to Mars, we want to land, we want to explore," he says. "I contend that this is a lot better than nothing. This would have been an icebreaker mission. It would have killed the dragons that suggest we can't go to Mars."

Zubrin and other commercial space advocates have grown fed up with NASA's timeline for getting back into the manned spaceflight game. Tito said as much in a press conference announcing his plan, which he estimates will cost between $1 and $2 million and is scheduled to happen in 2018.

"We have not sent humans beyond the moon in more than 40 years," he said. "I've been waiting, and a lot of people my age, have been waiting. And I think it's time to put an end to that lapse."

In a proposal paper published by Zubrin in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1996, he admits that a flyby mission is "not an optimal mission plan for human exploration of Mars," but "is a way to get started," an opinion he still holds.

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NASA Passed on Mars Flyby Mission in 1990s