Musk was elected academician with recyclable rocket SpaceX will release a major technology update

On February 10, the National Academy of Engineering announced the list of new academicians, and Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, and Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, were on the list.

According to the National Academy of Engineering website, Musk was elected a Fellow of the U.S. Academy of Engineering as founder, CEO, and principal engineer of SpaceX in California, in recognition of his breakthroughs in the design, engineering, manufacturing, and operation of reusable launch vehicles, sustainable transportation, and energy systems.

Nadella was chosen to advance enterprise computing infrastructure as a cloud service and to take an international lead in social technology systems and practices.

Musk thanked him through social media after his election. The world's richest man is now worth more than $240 billion thanks to Tesla's soaring market capitalization. He also founded the tunneling company Boring Company and the brain-computer interface company Neuralink.

Last December, Musk was named Time Magazine's 2021 Person of the Year for promoting "disruptive change in society." Speaking about the space exploration cause, Musk said: "The overall goal is to make humanity a transstellar species, not because it's profitable, but because it's exciting, at least for me." ”

Because space launches are a hugely expensive mission, Musk and his team reduced costs by developing reusable rockets, avoiding the company's once-brink bankruptcy.

Musk has said that the fully reusable Earth orbit launch vehicle is revolutionary for human space technology. "A lot of really smart people give up after trying it out, and I'm still not sure if that's really achievable." He said in an interview.

In the past 6 years, SpaceX has successfully recovered the first stage landing of 90 Falcon 9 heavy rockets and re-launched 72 of them, but so far it has not achieved a full recovery of both stages of rockets at the same time.

SpaceX will release an important technical update on February 10, local time, which will also be the first time Musk has provided a report on the progress of Starship since September 2019.

This is crucial for the company to put a Starship into orbit for the first time, and SpaceX plans to conduct its first test flight in early March this year.

The giant spacecraft, named SN20, is powered by 33 engines at a huge bottom of 230 feet and requires more than 7.5 million pounds of liquid fuel. Both spacecraft and engines are capable of being fully reused. Musk plans to make a one-way orbit of the moon by 2023 and land on the lunar surface within three years.

According to videos and pictures posted by Musk on social media on Feb. 9, SpaceX is stacking Starships. The video shows the crane arm lifting the starship above the giant booster.

Musk is likely to speak at 9 p.m. local time on Thursday and give a demonstration of SpaceX's major technological advances, which will be webcast.