SpaceX launched another of its mammoth Starship rockets on a test flight on Monday, striving to make it halfway around the world while releasing mock satellites as it did the last time.
Starship – the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built – thundered into the evening sky from the southern tip of Texas just after 6.25pm local time, according to a live video feed.
The booster was programmed to peel away and drop into the Gulf of Mexico, with the spacecraft skimming space before descending into the Indian Ocean. Nothing was being recovered.
It was the 11th test flight for a full-scale Starship, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk intends to use to send people to Mars.
Nasa’s need is more immediate. The space agency cannot land astronauts on the moon by decade’s end without the 123-metre (403-ft) Starship, the reusable vehicle meant to get them from lunar orbit down to the surface and back up.
Instead of remaining inside Launch Control as usual, Musk said that for the first time he was going outside to watch , saying it was “much more visceral”.
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