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SpaceX
Towering 407 feet (124 metres), Starship soared from the company's base at the southern tip of Texas. NASA monitored the flight, a critical step toward using the Starship as a lunar lander for moon crews. Elon Musk's SpaceX replaced six of the 33 engines on the first-stage booster after they failed to ignite last week, resulting in a last-second launch abort. The previous Starship flight in May also experienced engine trouble, which prevented the booster from making a controlled return. It was the 13th flight of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket, and the second this year of the new version dubbed V3. Like the previous demo that climbed as high as 125 miles (200 kilometres), neither the booster nor spacecraft was being saved, instead ditching into the sea. The booster was bound for the Gulf of Mexico and the stainless steel, retro-looking spacecraft for the Indian Ocean more than 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometres) from where the hourlong flight began. The Starlinks had a job
SpaceX's mega Starship rocket came within a few seconds of blasting off on a test flight, but some of the engines failed to start triggering a launch abort. Elon Musk's company said on Thursday that it will have to figure out what went wrong before making another attempt to send Starship on a space-skimming flight halfway around the world. It was supposed to be the 13th flight for Starship, which at 407 feet (124 metres) tall with 33 main engines is the world's biggest and most powerful rocket. Twenty of SpaceX's newest and most advanced Starlinks were on board Starship for release during the planned hourlong flight. The internet satellites were going to try communicating with Starlinks already in orbit while taking photos of Starship's heat shield. Neither the first-stage booster nor spacecraft were meant to be recovered, with both ending up in the sea. NASA is counting on Starship to land its astronauts on the moon in the next few years.