‘This will be Mars one day,’ Elon Musk shares photo of spacecraft launch

The rocket in the picture is SpaceX’s Starship project–a reusable rocket system on which the company is currently working at.

Last month, the SpaceX CEO wrote, “Mars may be a fixer-upper of a planet, but it has great potential.”

A Twitter user asked Musk about the estimated timeframe for human civilization on Marsh. Musk responded by saying, “20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential.”

Yesterday, Elon Musk’s SpaceX won certification from the Pentagon’s Space Force to use recyclable boosters on its Falcon Heavy rocket to launch top-secret spy satellites.

The certification for SpaceX — which was issued in June but not previously disclosed — allows the recyclable first-stage side boosters to be used in sensitive national security launches requiring power performance beyond that of the company’s original Falcon 9. The Space Force found that the “recovery, refurbishment, and launch of SpaceX boosters utilizes well-established processes,” the service said in a statement.

The first classified National Security Space Launch mission using a Falcon Heavy with refurbished boosters is scheduled for sometime from October to December, according to the Space Force. It’s a mission to launch a satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office, which develops and manages spy satellites, according to a previous Space Force statement.

SpaceX has launched more than 100 missions using the Falcon 9 with reusable boosters, most of them commercial.

The reuse of previously flown boosters on Falcon 9 missions has “saved the US Space Force more than $64 million for GPS III missions and avoided additional costs for requirements changes while adding manifest flexibility for both the launch provider and our warfighters,” Walter Lauderdale, chief of the Falcon Division within the Space Systems Command’s “Assured Access to Space” organization, said in a statement.

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