The SpaceX Starship, the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket, completed its most successful test flight yet on Thursday, returning to Earth without exploding.
Thursday’s test flight was Starship’s fourth, and it marked a significant step toward reaching SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s eventual goal of building a reusable rocket that could one day bring people to Mars.
The three previous test flights — one in March and two last year — all saw the rocket explode, although the most recent March flight came close to avoiding an explosion. The other two exploded shortly after blasting off.
Musk said ahead of the latest test flight that his “primary goal is getting through max re-entry heating.”
On Thursday, live footage of the Starship flight showed some parts of the rocket breaking away as it reached extremely high temperatures upon reentry to earth. Still, the spacecraft managed to splash down in the Indian Ocean in a controlled fashion and remained sufficiently intact to be able to transmit data before landing.
Prior to its descent, the spacecraft had reached an altitude of nearly 130 miles, traveling at more than 16,000 miles per hour.
The test flight was applauded by SpaceX employees, as well as by those at NASA.
“Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!” Musk said on X, the social platform he owns.
The New York Times reported that onlooking SpaceX employees outside mission control “cheered wildly, seeing the outcome as a validation of the company’s break-it-then-fix-it approach to engineering.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson cheered the progress on Thursday. NASA plans to use a SpaceX Starship for Artemis III, which is scheduled to bring astronauts to the moon in late 2026.
“We are another step closer to returning humanity to the Moon through #Artemis—then looking onward to Mars,” Nelson wrote.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
