SpaceX successfully launched its heavy-lift Starship rocket on Thursday, achieving a series of ambitious goals set by company CEO Elon Musk ahead of the test flight, the rocket’s fourth.

While the test flight was not perfect, it showed that Musk’s vision of building the largest launch vehicle yet and making it reusable could once again change the global space launch industry, in which his company has come to dominate. It was perhaps most encouraging news for officials at NASA, which will use some type of Starship to send astronauts to the lunar surface as part of its Artemis 3 mission, currently scheduled for late 2026.

NASA head Bill Nelson expressed his congratulations on social media platform X, which is also owned by Musk.

“We’re one step closer to returning humans to the Moon through #Artemis, and on to Mars,” he wrote.

The “Starship” spacecraft was located on top of the rocket. After entering space, the spacecraft flew half a circle around the earth, withstood the high temperature burning of re-entering the atmosphere, and then splashed down in the Indian Ocean as planned.

During the descent, the spacecraft’s camera captured the colorful glow of the heated gas below. When it descended to an altitude of about 50,000 meters above sea level, part of one of the spacecraft’s steering flaps gradually began to break, but it did not completely disintegrate. The subsequent video shooting was hampered by the lens being broken by debris.

“The question is how much of the spacecraft is left,” said Kate Theis, one of the hosts of the SpaceX live show.

Although the camera was no longer working, real-time data continued to be transmitted back to the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, via SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet until the spacecraft reported zero altitude, that is, it descended to the surface of the Indian Ocean.

Before splashdown, the spacecraft received a command to flip to a vertical position.

“Despite the loss of many ceramic tiles and damage to the flaps, Starship successfully splashed down at sea!” Musk wrote on X.

Outside Mission Control, a group of SpaceX employees watching the livestream cheered with excitement, viewing the success as confirmation of the company’s break-it-then-fix-it approach to engineering.

The rocket’s first stage, the 33-engine Super Heavy booster, also completed maneuvers earlier in the flight that will allow it to return to the launch site, including a simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico.

From all aspects,It is arguably the largest and most powerful rocket system ever built, with the first stage, which SpaceX calls the Super Heavy booster, at the bottom and the Starship spacecraft at the top.

The rocket system is also the tallest ever, with a height of 122 meters, which is about 30 meters higher than the Statue of Liberty including the pedestal.

The rocket system also has the largest number of engines in history: the Super Heavy booster at the bottom has 33 SpaceX’s powerful “Raptor” engines. When these engines are fully powered to push the “Starship” spacecraft from the launch pad into space, they can generate 7,590 tons of thrust.

For Musk, Starship is really a Mars spaceship, and he envisions a fleet of Starships that would carry settlers to the red planet.

For NASA, Starship will be used for lunar landing missions, sending astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.

In the short term, SpaceX also plans to use Starship to deploy the next-generation Starlink communications satellite internet.

One of Starship’s more transformative features is that it is designed to be fully reusable, a capability that has the potential to drive down the cost of getting payloads into orbit, making it possible, by Musk’s estimation, to one day send 100 tons of payload into space for less than $10 million.

After a successful practice launch two weeks ago, Musk wrote on X that the test flight’s “primary goal is to survive the highest temperature burn during reentry.”

In other words, he didn’t want to see the craft burn up.

During the launch, Starship reached an orbital speed of more than 27,000 kilometers per hour and reached an altitude of 232 kilometers. As the spacecraft plunges back into the atmosphere, it will experience temperatures of more than 1,400 degrees Celsius.

Starship withstood those intense heat before splashing down in a remote area of ​​the Indian Ocean on Thursday. Another goal of the launch was to have a soft splashdown of the rocket’s first stage, the Super Heavy booster, in the Gulf of Mexico.

In future operational flights, both stages will return to the launch site and be caught intact by the tower. These attempts still need to be made in the future.

In March of this yearLast launchDuring the ascent, Starship reached orbital speeds for the first time. That ascent included a successful new experiment: hot separation, in which the second-stage engines fired before all of the rocket’s first stage, the Super Heavy booster, had fallen off.

The Starship spacecraft, which serves as the second stage, completed some of its goals during that space flight, including opening and closing the spacecraft’s payload bay door and demonstrating the transfer of propellant from one fuel tank to another inside the spacecraft.

But when it reached the highest point of its flight orbit, the starship began to lose control. The camera on the spacecraft captured the followingOrange light from hot plasmaThe spacecraft disintegrated approximately 49 minutes after launch and lost contact with the ground at an altitude of 64 kilometers.

Earlier in that flight, the Super Heavy was supposed to complete a simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico, but six of the 13 engines performing the maneuver shut down prematurely.

SpaceX has attributed the most likely causes of the Starship and Super Heavy booster failures to obstructions in the flow of propellant, and the company says it has made design improvements to address those issues.