A mock-up of what a future Mars colony might look like. (Photo: Mars One)

Imagine waking up on another planet, the Earth is just a speck in the sky and Mars dust is under your feet.

If SpaceX founder Elon Musk has his way, being a citizen on an alien planet could be a possibility in your lifetime, Discovery News reports. Musk hopes his company will be able to fly humans to Mars within the next 12 years. Of course, his plan all depends on whether or not he has the funding for an even loftier goal: Building a fully functioning city on the red planet by 2026.

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"I’m hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it’s certainly possible for that to occur," Musk said in a recent interview with CNBC. "But the thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multi-planetary."

While a human Mars colony sounds far-fetched, few things have seemed out of reach to Musk so far. Forbes described him as "more like Tony Stark than an ordinary CEO."

The founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors already secured $1.6 billion in funding through NASA for SpaceX’s Falcon rocket series and Dragon space capsule, which became the first commercial rocket to deliver supplies to the International Space Station in 2012.

NASA itself has only pledged to get human beings to Mars by 2035, the Independent reports. But Musk hardly sees himself as a competitor to NASA. In fact, NASA’s support may be essential to his plan to take people to Mars going forward.

Next up, the company will compete with two other commercial spaceflight companies, Sierra Nevada and Boeing, for a NASA contract to launch astronauts to the ISS. The company unveiled the crewed version of the Dragon capsule — the Dragon "V2" (version 2) — last month.

If SpaceX isn't the winner, Musk still plans to forge ahead with his plans to develop rockets capable of sending people to Mars. The company already has the Falcon Heavy rocket, which is powerful enough to launch heavy components for a Mars mission, in their arsenal. If they were to lose the NASA contract, Musk plans to take the company public and court investors.

"It’s possible that we may not win the commercial crew contract. We’ll do our best to continue on our own, with our own money," he said. "We would not be where we are today without the help of NASA."

But why the rush to deliver humans to a planet that, so far, is pretty inhospitable to human life?

For Musk, establishing a Mars colony is essential to our species' survival.

“We’ll either be a multi-planet species and out there among the stars,” Musk told CNBC, “Or a single planet species until some eventual extinction event, natural or man-made. “

MORE ON WEATHER.COM: Photos From the Red Planet

December Images from Mars

The NASA Mars rover Curiosity used its Mast Camera during the mission's 120th Martian day, or sol (Dec. 7, 2012), to record this view of a rock outcrop informally named Shaler. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS