Elon Musk, founder of Space X and Tesla Motors, has revealed his plans for building a city on Mars. An astute reader may notice that we are not capable of getting to Mars, much less building a city there, but then again dreaming small is something Elon Musk has never, ever, been accused of.

"The reason I haven't taken SpaceX public is the goals of SpaceX are very long-term, which is to establish a city on Mars," the billionaire CEO of SpaceX told reporters at the September 8 briefing.

In 2012 Musk gave Space.com some broad strokes about what colonizing Mars would require, including a landing party of about 10 people, followed by construction materials, followed by more people, who would have to pay their way at 500,000 dollars a head.

In order to achieve this goal Space X is working on The Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V. While SpaceX has yet to do any test flights with the Falcon Heavy, Musk told CNBC earlier this year he's hopeful his space company will get people to Mars by 2026.

Musk said, "I'm hopeful that the first people can be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years. I think it's certainly possible for that to occur."

Space X is not the only company taking up the mantle of space exploration, the company is currently competing with Boeing and Sierra Nevada for a 3 billion dollar NASA contract to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station by 2017. NASA will announce the winner of the contract later this month.

"Boeing is the safe choice, SpaceX is the exciting choice and Sierra Nevada the interesting choice,"Loren Thompson, an analyst with Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Virginia-based research group, said in an interview.

Winning that contract would be a big step for Musk's larger vision of colonizing Mars.

More recently, he elaborated on why he wants to colonize Mars on the Colbert Report: "We're aspiring to send people to Mars," Musk said on the show. "If humanity is on more than one planet - if we're a multi-planet species... then civilization as we know it -- the light of consciousness -- will likely propagate much further than if we're a single-planet species. And although I'm quite optimistic about life on Earth, at some point there's likely to be some calamity, either natural or man made. I'm not a doomsdayer but that preserves the future of humanity. It's like life insurance, collectively."

Musk said on CNBC's "Closing Bell" that this is a necessity for humanity to avoid encroaching doom.

Getting to Mars "will define a fundamental bifurcation of the future of human civilization," he explained. "[We] will either be a multi-planet species out there among the stars or a single planet species until some eventual extinction event, natural or manmade."

"The thing that matters long-term," he added, "is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars."

While Musk's ambition is admirable, some express concerns about the viablity of privately funded space exploration"Private enterprise will not ever lead a space frontier," reputed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently said in aBusiness Insider interview.  "Not because I don't want them to, but my read of history tells me 'they can't.' It's not possible."

Tyson went on to say that Space X's current role of transporting goods for NASA to and from the ISS, is a much more viable position.

"NASA should never had been in that business," he added, referring the space shuttle program.

"Once the maps are drawn and risks are established, then you can farm that off to industry."

In essence Tyson argues that the dirty thankless work of doing the exploring isn't economically viable until the path has been well established. 

SpaceX is scheduled to launch a resupply mission to the space station on Sept. 20 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Along with cargo of food and equipment, the spacecraft also will carry what's been dubbed the ISS-RapidScat instrument.

The instrument is a replacement for NASA's QuikScat Earth satellite, which has been monitoring ocean winds for climate research, weather predictions, and hurricane monitoring.

Even if Space X wins the contract, even if the Falcon Heavy is built, there are still the issue of long term effects of micro gravity enviornemnts on humans and difficulties involved in actually landing on the planet.