“SpaceX is planning to send Dragons to Mars as early as 2018,” the company said on Facebook. “Red Dragon missions will help inform the overall Mars architecture that will be unveiled later this year. These missions will help demonstrate the technologies needed to land large payloads propulsively on Mars.”

This is what Denis Tito wanted to do, sort of, but manned and a flyby. He could not get the money together to do it though. Also looks like NASA is involved in using the Red Dragon as a return vessel. THAT should be cool.