SpaceX launched its 11th Starship from Texas to land in the Indian Ocean on October 13. This was an attempt to test an improved version in future missions to the moon and Mars.
Starship, consisting of the Starship upper stage placed atop its Super Heavy booster, took off at SpaceX Starbase facilities.
Once the Starship stage had been launched to space, Super Heavy landed in the Gulf of Mexico 7 minutes after launching, using a landing engine design, and then blew itself up.
It is the final mission in August, which follows to end of a series of test failures earlier in the year.
The flight was much like the earlier one on Monday, with another batch of mock Starlink satellites being launched, during which it briefly re-lighted its engines in space and experimented with new heat shield tiles on its scorching hot re-entry into space, before landing in the west of Australia.
In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy stated that “another major step toward landing Americans on the Moon’s south pole.”
The company said on Monday that in further experiments, SpaceX anticipates setting up a more sophisticated version of the Starship prototype with upgrades needed to make the ship suitable to conduct long-term space missions.
That even involves docking adapters and any other hardware modifications important to orbital refueling, which can be a complex task involving two Starships docking in orbit to load hundreds of tons of super-cooled propellant.
