In any case, SpaceX has just announced plans to have one of its Dragon spacecraft on its way to the Red Planet as soon as 2018, four years earlier than anticipated.

NASA currently has unmanned rovers trawling the surface of Mars for signs of life, but if some of that red rock could be hauled back and prodded by scientists in fully equipped laboratories here on Earth the search may become more fruitful. NASA is preparing to send another rover to Mars in 2020 that will collect rock and soil samples, but the agency had no ironclad plan for how these might be returned to Earth.

Enter SpaceX and its unmanned Dragon capsule, which made history in 2012 as the first commercial spacecraft to carry cargo to the ISS and also return cargo to Earth. SpaceX had been at looking at modifying the Dragon spacecraft as an unmanned lander for the Martian surface, and last year this idea piqued the interest of NASA researchers.