Elon Musk, known for co-founding PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, finally figured out how to cutback the cost of a trip to Mars to only $500,000.  Though he hasn’t unveiled the details of his plan, Musk stated in an interview with BBC that he will disclose his money-saving plans late this year or early 2013.

“My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars – this is very important – so you don’t have to carry the return fuel when you go there,” Musk said.

“The whole system [must be] reusable – nothing is thrown away. That’s very important because then you’re just down to the cost of the propellant.

“We will probably unveil the overall strategy later this year in a little more detail, but I’m quite confident that it could work and that ultimately we could offer a round trip to Mars that the average person could afford – let’s say the average person after they’ve made some savings.”

Million dollar setback

If Musk is enthusiastic about the possibility of making the trip to Mars cheaper, planetary scientists are ranting at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference regarding the proposed budget cuts that would affect planetary science, as well as NASA’s robotic Mars explorer.

The Obama administration’s proposed cutback for 2013 would take more than $300 million from NASA’s planetary science division, with $225 million coming from their Mars exploration project.

Though the cutback will be implemented next year, it has already affected the agency.  NASA announced that they will withdraw from the joint Mars mission, ExoMars project, in 2016 and 2018 with the European Space Agency (ESA).

The downside is, Russia is taking NASA’s place on the project.  Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, indicated it would be willing to fill at least part of the role:

“Russia can replace just about everything NASA was going to provide for ExoMars except the lander,” ESA Director-General Jean-Jacques Dordain said.  “That is something we would have to develop, so already I know that ExoMars without NASA is going to cost us more than with NASA. How much more remains to be seen.”