Adventurous travelers looking for a unique vacation spot should start saving up right now. SpaceX is offering commercial round trip tickets to Mars for US$500,000.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, PayPal co-founder and currently SpaceX CEO said he had worked out way to offer this outer space travel package and that a round-trip to the Red Planet could be within reach for the average consumer in the next 30 to 50 years. He expects to release more details about his ambitious plan sometime later this year or early 2013.

Musk described his interplanetary plan in a BBC Radio 4 program hosted by Kevin Fong. In the interview he said that technology breakthroughs will make trips to Mars a realistic financial prospect. Although the initial price for the interplanetary trip will be much higher than $500,000 it would just take ten to fifteen years for the system to mature enough to bring the price down.

"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. 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. Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done."

Musk also added that for commercial trips to Mars to take off for consumers the ticket price should just cover the cost of fuel and not for the entire spacecraft. SpaceX is focused on building rockets that can be used for more than one mission.

"If you had to buy a new plane every time you flew somewhere, it would be incredibly expensive. A 747 costs something like $300m and you'd need two of them to do a round trip. And yet people aren't paying half a billion dollars to fly from LA to London, and that's because that 747 can be used tens of thousands of times. We must get to the same position in rocketry. That's really what's critical; in order to get a two orders of magnitude improvement beyond Falcon Heavy (in other words to get down to the $10 or $20 per pound to orbit range), you have to have high levels of reusability. You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place."

Of course Musk and SpaceX still has to prove that they can get to space. At present SpaceX is preparing to send its Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. The unmanned space craft was initially due to fly to ISS on February but the test flight was cancelled for more engineering tests. Manned flights are scheduled by 2014.