SpaceX launches another Starship rocket

SpaceX launched another of its giant Starship rockets on a test flight and, like last time, tried to go to the other side of the world by broadcasting fake satellites.

Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, roared into the evening sky from the southern tip of Texas on Monday.

After sending the Starship stage into space, Super Heavy returned to land in soft water in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 10 minutes after liftoff.

This was the 11th test flight for a full-scale Starship that SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk plans to use to send humans to Mars.

NASA’s need is more urgent. The space agency won’t be able to land astronauts on the moon until the end of the decade without the 123-foot Starship, which aims to launch and support astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface.

Musk said it was the first time he went out and monitored instead of staying at Launch Control as usual — “much more viscerally.”

A mission in August capped a series of test failures earlier this year as SpaceX stress-tested features for full reusability.

After Monday’s flight, SpaceX hopes to begin launching a more advanced Starship prototype equipped with features specifically designed for lunar and Mars missions.

SpaceX aims to deploy the second set of fake Starlink satellites into space during the mission and see the ship reach the Indian Ocean after returning to the earth’s atmosphere, where various experimental heat shield tiles on the Starship’s exterior will be confronted by super-hot plasma.

As before, Starship carried eight dummy 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