SpaceX’s Starship successfully launched into space (Picture: Brandon Bell/Getty)
SpaceX has successfully launched and landed the world’s biggest rocket, as Elon Musk’s Mars ambitions inch closer.
The 120-metre rocket is the biggest and most powerful spacecraft ever built, and its most recent test saw both parts of the rocket return to Earth for the first time.
The spacecraft, which is capable of producing 7.5 million kilograms of thrust, successfully splashed down for a ‘soft landing’ in the Indian Ocean, as its counterpart, the Super Heavy booster, landed in the Gulf of Mexico.
This is the fourth major flight test, and SpaceX’s most successful, and comes less than three months after the private space company launched a Starship prototype into orbit, but failed to return it to Earth.
Starship blasted off from Boca Chica, Texas, at 7.50am (1.50pm BST) before soaring to space and re-landing in 65 minutes.
It reached an altitude of nearly 211 kilometres (130 miles), travelling at more than 26,000km/h (16,000mph) before beginning its descent.
A live broadcast revealed that parts of the spacecraft broke off during the intense heat of reentry, and a chunk of flying debris even cracked the camera lens.
SpaceX CEO Mr Musk wrote on X: ‘Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!
‘Today was a great day for humanity’s future as a spacefaring civilization!’
Blast off to Mars
The success of the mission marks the critical milestone as SpaceX plans to develop a reusable rocket to get humanity to Mars.
The test flight completed several mission objectives, with one being achieving a fuel transfer up in the air.
This will be essential to landing humans on the Moon and ensuring that astronauts have enough propellant to reach Mars.
SpaceX said Starship is critical to create a ‘self-sustaining’ city on Mars. It is suggested that on Starship, it would just take six months to reach the Red planet.
Mars has been robotically studied for over 40 years (Picture: Nasa/Getty)
However, the window for a launch to Mars comes around only once every 26 months, where the orbits of the two planets allow for the most favourable flight path.
Mr Musk has pinned his hopes on going to Mars by 2029, and to colonise the planet by 2050.
However, this timeline has been scrutinised by researchers. A study, published in Scientific reports, discussed the feasibility of SpaceX’s human exploration Mars mission, and found there are significant technological gaps in the plans.
They conclude that SpaceX’s mission plans to blast off to Mars by 2029 is not feasible with the information that SpaceX has currently provided.
But the researchers said if certain hurdles such as getting the nuclear reactors of the propellant systems ready and rescaled to make them smaller and lighter, then perhaps the first Starships could be launched by the mid 2030s.
Nasa is also hoping to send humans to Mars by the 2030s, as it is one of the only other places the American Space Agency knows where life may have existed in the solar system, and somewhere we can learn more about how our solar system formed.
There are several things to consider, such as oxygen, food and water, as well as communication, shelter and how we can roam the surface before making a journey to Mars happen. But with Mr Musk’s and Nasa’s ambitions, we could perhaps see it in our lifetime.