ELON Musk has stunned space enthusiasts worldwide by announcing plans to send a test space vehicle to Mars in the first half of 2019.

He made the surprise timeline claims while addressing an audience at the South by South West (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, yesterday.

Getty - Contributor Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and has a reddish appearance thanks to the iron oxide on its surface

How long does it take to travel to Mars?

There's an immense distance between Earth and Mars, which means any trip to the red planet will take a very long time.

It's also made more complicated by the fact that the distance is constantly changing as the two planets rotate around the sun.

The closest that the Earth and Mars would ever be is a distance of 33.9million miles – that's 9,800 times the distance between London and New York.

That's really rare though: the more useful distance is the average, which is 140million miles.

Scientists on Earth have already launched a whole bunch of spacecraft to (or near) Mars, so we have a rough idea of how long it takes with current technology.

Historically, the trip has taken anywhere from 128 to 333 days - admittedly a huge length of time for humans to be on board a cramped spacecraft.

Getty Images - Getty SpaceX boss Elon Musk says the journey time to Mars could be as low as 30 days eventually

What has Elon Musk been talking about now?

Billionaire businessman and all-round space enthusiast Elon Musk claims his company will be able to launch test flights to the Red Planet as early as the first half of 2019.

He made the timeline announcement while addressing an audience at the South by South West (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas.

Musk claims that it is vital for humans to reach Mars before the next "probable" world war, with a colonised Red Planet likely to reduce the chances of an extended new Dark Ages if a nuclear conflict was to wipe out life on Earth.

His comments come just weeks after his SpaceX company stunned the world with its Falcon Heavy launch in February.

What was Elon Musk's SpaceX launch?

SpaceX's recently launched Falcon Heavy payload – which included a Tesla car – is expected to pass Mars by around October, although there's no official public estimate.

Tech mogul Elon Musk – who heads up SpaceX – says his Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) could manage the journey in just 80 days.

Musk's firm is spending tens of millions of dollars on the project each year, and expects it to cost more than $10billion (£7.2billion) overall.

It's expected that most of Musk's engineers will be working on ITS by the end of 2018, with the end goal of colonising Mars.

SpaceX currently expects to send its first cargo mission to Mars in 2022, with a human mission mooted for 2024.

Excitingly, Musk believes that his ITS ship will eventually be able to manage the Earth to Mars journey in just 30 days.

NASA reckons it could beat Musk's time though, if it can scale up a propulsion technology that uses a stream of photons – rather than fuel – to propel a spacecraft.

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The system would involve kitting out a spaceship with reflectors that could be struck by photons, propelling it forward.

Scientists have achieved nippy speeds on a tiny level in laboratories, but we're still years away from using it to propel a large, heavy object like a spacecraft.

But if NASA can crack the puzzle, the travel time of a small 100kg craft could be reduced to just three days.

Tim Peake has thrown his weight behind Musk and said his efforts could help mankind reach Mars sooner than anticipated.

Stunning footage of the Tesla Roadster and Starman floating in space after being launched on the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket

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