SpaceX: Shooting for Mars in 2 years
SpaceX plans to send a Dragon spacecraft to Mars as soon as 2018.
The company announced its intentions in a tweet on Wednesday.
Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018.
It appeared NASA will assist SpaceX with its plans, according to a statement sent to CNBC.
"Building on an existing no-funds-exchanged collaboration with SpaceX, NASA will provide technical support for the firm's plan to attempt to land an uncrewed Dragon 2 spacecraft on Mars," a NASA spokesperson said in the Wednesday statement. "This collaboration could provide valuable entry, descent and landing data to NASA for our journey to Mars, while providing support to American industry. We have similar agreements with dozens of U.S. commercial, government, and non-profit partners."
This is not the first time SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has talked about putting spacecraft on Mars. He told CNBC in 2014 that he believed the company can put humans on the Red Planet by 2026. The Red Dragons referred to in the Wednesday tweet refer to the "Red Dragons" project. SpaceX has been working on building low-cost unmanned spacecraft that could travel to Mars.
The company recently completed its first successful ocean platform landing of a Falcon rocket on April 8, after launching its eighth commercial services resupply mission to the International Space Station. An attempted resupply mission last June failed when the rocket exploded shortly after launch.