SpaceX’s Starship, the biggest and most powerful spacecraft ever launched, successfully completed its 11th test flight, bringing the company closer to sending humans to other worlds.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wants to take humans to the moon, and eventually Mars. NASA chose Starship to carry its crewed lander on its Artemis missions, which hope to put astronauts on the lunar surface in 2027.
Test flights seven, eight, and nine ended in “rapid unexpected disassembly,” but this and the last performed well, with the splashdown in the Indian Ocean so accurate that it landed within sight of a camera buoy which captured the ship’s last moments. This iteration of the rocket is the last before an even larger variant is built.