The missile was launched from Texas at 23:15 GMT. She rose 10 km into the sky and then returned to Earth.
This was the third test flight of the bigaltitude for the Starship, but the first one landed successfully. The two immediate predecessors of the SN10, SN8 and SN9, flew well during their excursions — December 9, 2020 and February 2 this year, respectively — but both hit the ground hard and were broken into pieces.
SpaceX is developing Starship to deliverpeople and payloads to the Moon, Mars and other distant places, as well as perform any other missions that the company requires. Indeed, SpaceX plans to eventually ditch other flight equipment - the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, as well as the Dragon's cargo and crew capsules - and let Starship take over the entire load, said company founder and CEO Elon Musk.
The test was carried out the next day afterafter Yusaku Maezawa announced the "dearMoon" mission update. This flight will send the Japanese billionaire and about 10 other people on a trip to and from the moon on an approximately week-long Starship mission. This is expected to be the first human flight beyond low Earth orbit on a spacecraft, and should be farther from Earth than any previous human flight.
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