Elon Musk's SpaceX wants to send a spacecraft to Mars by 2018

Miriam Kramer
Updated
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SpaceX wants to go to Mars as early as 2018, according to a Tweet from the company's account on Wednesday. 

This is the first time that the company has attached a specific date to its Mars aspirations, though founder Elon Musk has been talking for years about going to Mars.

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The billionaire has speculated on ways we could make the red planet habitable for humans, and has openly discussed SpaceX’s plans to colonize Mars. 

This somewhat more official announcement gives a real timeline for a possible Mars mission.

The "Red Dragon" missions won't be crewed, but they will help the company develop and work the kinks out of the technologies needed to send big payloads and even establish a colony on the red planet, according to SpaceX. 

SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002, tweeted two artist illustrations of a launcher — presumably the Falcon Heavy rocket — and a craft that looks like the company's crewed Dragon capsule on the surface of Mars. (That Dragon capsule image was actually uploaded to SpaceX's Flickr page in 2015, though no announcement was made at that time.)

This story is developing...