SpaceX says their Dragon capsule, which is set to make its first test flight to the ISS later this month, could be dispatched to Mars, drastically cutting the cost of exploration on the red planet, Nature News reports.

The company is working with researchers at NASA Ames Research Center on a proposal for a first “Red Dragon” mission.

The most challenging part of any Mars mission is taking a spacecraft through the Martian atmosphere at high speed and then slowing it down to a soft landing. Proponents of the Red Dragon concept say that this could be done using the eight small rocket motors that will be added to the capsule for escape from the Falcon 9 rocket — a requirement for carrying humans, in case of an aborted launch.

Meanwhile, Russia will make an ambitious attempt to go to the Martian moon Phobos and come back, IEEE Spectrum Tech Talk reports. The spacecraft Phobos-Grunt is slated to take off at 12:15 am Moscow time on Wednesday (3:15 pm EST on Tuesday) from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Phobos-Grunt (“grunt” is the Russian word for “soil”) will spend 11 months traveling to Mars and then a few months in orbit before finally setting down on Phobos in early 2013. Once there, the spacecraft, which will weigh about 400 grams on the moon’s surface, will use a robotic arm to scoop up about 200 grams of soil into a capsule. A smaller return spacecraft will make the return trip to Earth, where it will land without a parachute in August 2014.

Phobos-Grunt isn’t the only Mars-bound spacecraft poised to launch this month. NASA’s radioisotope-powered, 900-kg rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, is scheduled to launch on November 25.