Not if you want it dependable enough to entrust a multi billion dollar project and several people’s lives to it.
People talk about the moon mission like some massive conquest of space, but we needed to get the fuck off the moon much past sunrise or astronauts would have cooked. It was based on extremely limited oxygen supplies and involved significant radiation exposure that was only ok because again we ran away from an extremely inhospitable environment before things went wrong.
Even today the ISS benefits from earths magnetic field, its space light not a true replica of a mars mission.
The biggest problem is that people have really lost the ability to think big. There's always infinite reasons to not do something, and there will never be a perfect time. So at some point you simply have to choose to push forward. Like Kennedy put it:
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
Talk about hyperbole.
The moon mission has been prepared for before that speech took place. It wasn’t just starting from scratch and hitting the moon in 7 years, instead the speech was more public disclosure of a deadline that looked achievable but would hit after his presidency (1960 + 8 being less than before the decade is out: 1970).
The biggest problem is we already did the easy stuff. Playing tag with the moon is unbelievably easier than a permanent moon base or landing on Mars and getting back to earth.
Saying we'd be on the Moon in 7 years was not something that looked achievable except to the most fanatical of enthusiasts. To the average layman it would have sounded no less impossible than me saying we'll have a man on Mars in 7 years from today. And landing on Mars in many ways will be much easier than the Moon. Not only is the terrain broadly more hospitable, but you have an atmosphere to enable aerobraking which simplifies both landing and braking and enables various options (like some sort of parachute staging or backup). The biggest and really only complexity with Mars is its distance. Outside of that it's easy mode.
The mention of "quality factor" here just begs the question. The reason we need research on biological effects of high-Z ion exposure is that it has a different mechanism of damage, not captured by that paradigm.
With the current worldwide ageing demographics, it would have the added benefit of providing an awesome feat to inspire seniors across the world to not go gentle into that good night, showing old age should burn and rave at close of day.
A hypothetical 500 day mars mission is ~1 Sv optimistically which is something like 5% fatal cancer risk. A 3 year mission you’re well above that even before considering solar storms etc.
I think many would sign up for a mars mission especially as treatment improves, but there’s only so much wiggle room here.