Elon Musk says SpaceX will land rockets on Mars 'well before 2030' and his European rivals are 'aiming too low'

• SpaceX expects to land Starship rockets on Mars "well before 2030," Elon Musk tweeted.
• Musk's tweet was responding to an article about Europe lagging behind SpaceX in the space industry.
• Musk previously said SpaceX could land humans on Mars by 2026, but experts raised doubts about this.

SpaceX's founder and CEO, Elon Musk, on Tuesday said the company would land Starships on Mars "well before" 2030 and urged Europe to aim higher with its rocket technology to keep up in the space race.

He was responding to an Ars Technica article that said Europe would begin to focus on competitive launch systems as soon as 2030 and that European companies were trailing SpaceX.

"SpaceX will be landing Starships on Mars well before 2030," the billionaire tweeted. "The really hard threshold is making Mars Base Alpha self-sustaining."

Musk eventually plans to build 1,000 Starship rockets and launch three of them a day to send 1 million people to Mars.

In the tweet thread, Musk also said Europe was "aiming too low" with its launch efforts, saying "only rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable will be competitive."

The 387-foot-long Starship rocket is meant to be fully and rapidly reusable. The most recent three prototypes have all exploded during testing. The company is planning to launch Starship serial No. 11, or SN11, this week.

Musk has thrown around various timeframes for landing on Mars, and experts previously told Insider it might take longer than he's forecasting.

In February, Musk said in an interview on the audio app Clubhouse that it would take SpaceX "5 1/2 years" for a crewed mission of its Starship rocket to reach Mars. His time line has remained roughly the same for the past five months.

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Musk said in October and December that he was "highly confident" the space company had a "fighting chance" of launching an uncrewed rocket to the planet in 2024, followed by a crewed mission in 2026.

In 2017, he predicted that SpaceX would send cargo ships to Mars in 2022, followed by a crewed mission two years later.

Experts told Insider that SpaceX had only three remaining launch opportunities to successfully land humans on Mars by 2026. They said if everything went perfectly, Musk could achieve his goal.