You and I aren’t going to Mars anytime soon, but if and when a base is established on the Red Planet one day, Elon Musk wants a ticket there to cost about what you’d pay for a California home. In other words, about $500,000.

"From a ticket price perspective, we’ve got to get the ticket price down to the point where enough people can afford to go to Mars if they sell all their stuff on Earth,” said Musk Wednesday during the World Energy Innovation Forum confab at Tesla Motors factory in Fremont, California, which formerly churned out cars for General Motors and Toyota.

Musk, of course, has made no secret of his ambition to use his SpaceX rocket company as the vehicle to get thousands of people to Mars to establish a permanent human presence.

But that’s not going to happen until the cost of space travels fall exponentially and the technological hurdles of building a Mars colony are overcome. And that’s likely rather far into the future.

Closer to reality is a mass-market electric car that can travel 200 miles or more on a charge. In other words, a Tesla Model S for the price of a Nissan Leaf. Musk made headlines—again—when his other venture, Tesla, announced plans to build the world’s largest lithium ion battery manufacturing plant—the so-called $5 billion gigafactory—to drive down the costs of long-rage electric car batteries.