SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX announced Wednesday that it intends to begin sending uncrewed Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018. This is the first step in the company's plan to one day land humans on Mars, which is the goal founder Elon Musk set for SpaceX when he created the company in 2002.

According to the company, these initial test missions will help demonstrate the technologies needed to land large payloads propulsively on Mars. This series of missions, to be launched on the company's not-yet-completed Falcon Heavy rocket, will provide key data for SpaceX as the company develops an overall plan to send humans to the Red Planet to colonize Mars.

One of the biggest challenges in landing on Mars is the fact that its atmosphere is so thin it provides little braking capacity. To land the 900kg Curiosity rover on Mars, NASA had to devise the complicated sky crane system that led to its "Seven Minutes of Terror." A Dragon would weigh much more, perhaps about 6,000kg. To solve this problem, SpaceX plans to use an upgraded spacecraft, a Dragon2 powered by eight SuperDraco engines, to land using propulsion.

As can be seen in the video below, SpaceX demonstrated this propulsive capability at its rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas, in January:

To date SpaceX has revealed almost no specifics about its ambitious plans to send humans to Mars, something NASA acknowledges it cannot do itself before the late 2030s—with more than $100 billion, to boot. It is therefore safe to say there is a fair amount of skepticism in the traditional aerospace community about SpaceX's technical and financial wherewithal to pull off the colonization of Mars during the next couple of decades. But Musk has said human missions could begin by about 2025.

The founder of SpaceX has promised to reveal more details about the company's much-anticipated Mars architecture at this year's International Astronautical Conference, which will be held in Guadalajara, Mexico, from September 26 to 30.

Listing image by SpaceX