Elon Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, announced last Wednesday morning it planned to send one of its spaceships to Mars by 2018, the most ambitious goal set to date by the burgeoning private space travel industry funded by billionaires instead of governments.

上周三早晨，伊隆·马斯克的火箭公司SpaceX宣布其计划在2018年向火星发射太空飞船。这是目前私人公司中最具野心的目标。私人太空旅游产业并非由政府资助，而是由富翁们出资。

The mission would be unmanned, Musk said in a Twitter post, but the flights will be used to learn how to land the sorts of large payloads humans would need should they ever colonize the red planet, another SpaceX executive said.

马斯克发推表示，这次将会是一艘无人太空飞船。另一位SpaceX的主管表示，这些飞行会被用来研究人类在定居火星时所需的负载量。

These days it takes about eight months to get to Mars via rocket, according to Nasa.

根据NASA表示，依靠目前的技术，到达火星需要八个月的时间。

SpaceX计划2018年发射无人飞船前往火星

And as Musk notes, the inside of his Dragon 2 rocket offers about as much space as a sport utility vehicle.

马斯克表示，他的龙2飞船内部空间至少得容得下一部运动型多用途车。

SpaceX recently made a breakthrough in privatized space flight. In early April it landed a reusable rocket on a robot-controlled floating platform; the idea being that would make it much cheaper to keep sending people beyond the atmosphere.

最近，SpaceX公司在太空飞行中取得了新突破。四月初，它成功地使一架可回收火箭在机器人控制的浮动平台上着陆。这个创意能够为持续将人类送出大气层节省了一大笔费用。

Nasa meantime is working on its own Mars missions, including an effort to send humans there by the 2030s.

同时，NASA也正进行其火星计划。其中就包括在2030年将人类送往火星。

But the US government has restricted the space program's funding in recent years, leaving it up to billionaires such as Musk, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos and Virgin's Richard Branson to fund their own would-be galactic fleets.

但是近几年来，美国政府一直限制该太空计划的预算，于是将机会留给了像马斯克、亚马逊总裁杰夫和维珍总裁理查德·布兰森这样的亿万富翁们。他们用自己的资金来打造私人未来银河舰队。

The SpaceX executive said Nasa would offer some technical support, such as use of a deep-space communications network, but its Mars flight would be a “SpaceX mission”.

SpaceX的总经理表示，NASA会提供一些包括深空通讯网络的使用方法在内的技术支持，但这是SpaceX自己的火星项目。