SpaceX launches Super Heavy-Starship rocket after last two blew up; will it splashdown in Indian ocean? Watch!

Texas, March 14: The SpaceX Starship, a futuristic craft designed to eventually send astronauts to the moon and beyond, roared into the sky from Texas on Thursday, a third test launch that Elon Musk’s company hopes will carry it farther than two previous flights that ended with explosions.

The two-stage rocketship, taller than the Statue of Liberty, blasted off from the company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica on the Gulf Coast of Texas near Brownsville, on an uncrewed flight to space.

The launch marked only the third attempt to fly Starship mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster, both designed and built by SpaceX, the rocket and satellite company founded in 2002 by billionaire entrepreneur Musk.

A live SpaceX webcast of the liftoff showed the rocketship rising from the launch tower into the morning sky as the Super Heavy’s cluster of powerful Raptor engines thundered to life in a ball of flame and billowing clouds of exhaust and water vapor.

The launch came less than 24 hours after federal regulators granted SpaceX a launch license for the test.Unlike the first two test flights last year, aimed mainly at demonstrating that the spacecraft’s two stages can separate after launch, plans for Thursday’s test called for an attempt to open Starship’s payload door and reignite one of its engines in space.Each of the previous flights were routed toward a planned crash landing near the Hawaiian islands in the Pacific, while the latest flight was targeting a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean.

Even if it achieves more of its test objectives than before, SpaceX acknowledged a high probability that Starship’s latest flight would end up like the first two, with the vehicle blowing itself to bits before its intended trajectory is complete.

Regardless of how well it performed on Thursday, all indications are that Starship remains a considerable distance from becoming fully operational.Musk, SpaceX’s billionaire founder and CEO, has said the rocket should fly hundreds of uncrewed missions before carrying its first humans. And several other ambitious milestones overseen by NASA are needed before the craft can execute a moon landing with American astronauts.