The tiny country of Turkmenistan hopes to be a major player in space exploration. The nation recently launched an unmanned rocket from PayPal founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX space exploration company.

The Central Asian country launched its first telecommunications satellite from Cape Canaveral. The satelllite, TurkmenAlem52E, will transmit TV broadcasts to 1 billion people around the world.

“The launch is a vital first step in Turkmenistan’s development as a space nation,” said Jean Loic Galle, president and chief executive of Thales Alenia Space.

SpaceX is the pet project of Musk. The latest launch is the second in two weeks from SpaceX.

Along with other billionaires Virgin CEO Richard Branson and Amazon head Jeff Bezos, Musk is adamant about creating private space exploration through his own wealth and grants from Google and NASA.

“The long-term goal is to create technology necessary to take humanity beyond Earth,” said Musk.

Musk also has even loftier goals for SpaceX in the future.

“I was confused as to why we had not yet sent a person to Mars,” Musk said. “It seemed like this was obviously the goal after the moon and we’d not made progress on that.”

With this SpaceX launch, Musk is not only helping space exploration in other countries -he’s helping America possibly explore Mars and beyond.