Private spaceflight has barely taken off but brash space entrepreneur Elon Musk boasts his spacecraft can get humans to Mars as early as 2026.

The man who gave the world PayPal, Tesla Motors, Inc. and SpaceX or Space Exploration Technologies Corporation said he's "... hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years.

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"I think it's certainly possible for that to occur. But the thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multi-planetary."

Musk said the goal of SpaceX, the space transport services company he founded in 2002 in California, was essential to the future survival of humanity.

He believes humankind could become extinct due to a man-made or natural catastrophe. The only way to prevent human extinction would be for man to become an "interplanetary species" colonizing other planets and star systems.

Development of SpaceX's Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) and its super-heavy launch vehicle will be a major focus of the company once Falcon Heavy and DragonCrew are flying regularly.

The super-heavy MCT lift launch vehicle will consist of one or three 10 meter-diameter cores and will use nine Raptor LOX/methane engines to power each core. It's also intended to be reusable and will produce some 40 or 120 meganewtons of thrust at liftoff.

Musk's lofty interplanetary ambitions, however, will need billions of dollars in public funding and a rocket large enough for the six-month long trip to Mars. His Falcon Heavy launch vehicle is scheduled to fly in 2015 and will carry the necessary payload to assemble a Mars-bound space vehicle.

Part of the funding could come from a float of SpaceX stock on the stock exchange. Musk said this should become feasible once the technology has been perfected. He said this would be a tough sell today given that financial markets obsession with quarterly and annual goals.

"We need to get where things are steady and predictable," Musk said. "Maybe we're close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally we've flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense."

Musk's brazen prediction won't endear him to his client, NASA, which plans to land humans on the fabled Red Planet by the 2030s.

SpaceX currently delivers cargo to the International Space Station, and hopes to win a contract to deliver crews to the ISS on its reusable Dragon spacecraft. 

TagsElon Musk, Space, SpaceX, humanity, extinction