Cheap travel to Mars sounds like a joke, but NASA and an American rocket engineering company are serious about making it a reality. NASA has partnered with Space Exploration Technologies Corp (aka SpaceX) to build a rocket called "Falcon Heavy".

The current specs for the project estimate that Falcon Heavy could carry a space capsule to Mars for hundreds of millions rather than billions, which in the context of space exploration is cheap. The SpaceX rocket will be used for prospecting missions to Mars to determine whether the planet could someday support human settlements. The long term vision of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is to make it possible for humans to become a multi-planet species, and to ensure a continued existence for humanity if some catastrophe were to befall the Earth.