SpaceX launches eleventh test flight of Starship rocket

SpaceX launched another of its mammoth Starship rockets on a test flight, striving to make it halfway around the world while releasing mock satellites like last time.

Starship - the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built - thundered into the evening sky from the southern tip of Texas on Monday.

After sending the Starship stage to space, Super Heavy returned for a soft water landing in the Gulf of Mexico roughly 10 minutes after liftoff.

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 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 - “much more visceral.”

A mission in August ended a streak of testing failures earlier this year as SpaceX pushed to stress-test features for its total reusability.

SpaceX, after Monday’s flight, is hoping to start launching a more advanced Starship prototype equipped with features tailored for moon and Mars missions.

SpaceX during the mission is aiming to deploy its second cluster of dummy Starlink satellites in space and see the ship reach the Indian Ocean after blazing back through earth’s atmosphere, where a variety of experimental heat shield tiles on Starship’s exterior will face super-hot plasma.

Like before, Starship carried up eight mock satellites mimicking SpaceX’s Starlinks.

SpaceX is modifying its Cape Canaveral launch sites to accommodate Starships, in addition to the much smaller Falcon rockets used to transport astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station for NASA.

with AP