The SpaceX Starship rocket performs its third groundbreaking test flight

SpaceX launched the third test flight of its Starship rocket on Thursday and reached space as the corporate pushed work on the enormous vehicle toward latest milestones.

Elon Musk’s company launched Starship around 9:25 a.m. EST from its Starbase near Boca Chica, Texas.

The rocket flew further than previous tests, and the flight lasted about an hour before Starship broke up over the Indian Ocean. The company noted that the vehicle didn’t enter the water, which was the intended end of the flight.

“We lost Ship 28,” Dan Huot, SpaceX communications manager, said on the corporate’s webcast.

The flight marks a major step toward SpaceX completing prototype testing and starting operational spacecraft launches.

Musk congratulated his company post shortly after launch, announcing that “The spacecraft has reached orbital velocity!”

NASA chief Bill Nelson also congratulated SpaceX on its “successful test flight!”

“The spaceship rose into the sky. Together we’re making great strides through Artemis to return humanity to the Moon, after which let’s look beyond to Mars,” Nelson, the NASA administrator, wrote in post on social media.

Last year, SpaceX tested the full Starship rocket system in two tests that took place in April and November. Both previous launches produced progressive but explosive results: although each rocket flew for several minutes, reaching space the latest, both vehicles were ultimately destroyed due to problems.

On Wednesday, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared SpaceX for a third launch attempt.

The Starship system is designed to be reusable and is intended to become a new method of transporting cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also crucial to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX has won a multi-billion dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis lunar program.

In its approach to Starship development, SpaceX heavily emphasizes a “constructing on what we have learned from previous flights” approach. The company says its strategy is focused on “recursive improvement” of the rocket, where even test flights with stunning results represent progress toward its goal of a fully reusable rocket that can deliver humans to the Moon and Mars .

Last year, Musk said he expected the company to spend about $2 billion in 2023 to develop the spacecraft.

Starship is both the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Completely stacked on a super-heavy booster, Starship is 397 feet tall and approximately 30 feet in diameter.

A 232-foot-tall super-heavy booster begins the rocket’s journey into space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines that collectively produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust — about twice the thrust of the 8.8 million-pound thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which first launched late last year.

The spacecraft itself, measuring 55 feet tall, has six Raptor engines – three for use in Earth’s atmosphere and three for operation in the vacuum of space.

The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. It takes over 10 million pounds of fuel to launch the entire system.

There were no people on board the Starship for the flight test. Company executives have previously stressed that SpaceX expects to complete hundreds of Starship missions before launching a rocket with any crew.

SpaceX has well exceeded the nearly eight-minute flight of its second launch and has achieved additional milestones.

During this flight, the company tested several new capabilities. These included opening and closing the spacecraft’s doors after entering space – which is how the rocket will deploy payloads such as satellites on future missions – and transferring fuel in-flight as part of a NASA demonstration, SpaceX confirmed. He did not conduct a planned demonstration of re-igniting spacecraft engines in space.