The world’s most powerful rocket will launch tonight, and Elon Musk will be hoping that being able to catch its booster wasn’t a fluke.
In October last year, SpaceX successfully landed Starship’s booster back on a launch tower, in a big step for making it fully reusable.
But at a test the following month, the catch of ‘Super Heavy’ had to be aborted and the booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.
Tonight, the rocket which is designed to be able to reach Mars will launch again, with a window starting at 10pm GMT.This will be its seventh test flight, and will be livestreamed from south Texas.
At 122m tall, Starship is designed to help humans go interplanetary, colonising Mars. Nasa also intends to use it to take astronauts back to the Moon.
This launch will be testing out ‘significant upgrades’ including its first payload deployment test, as well as attempting to show the Super Heavy booster catch can be repeated.
SpaceX said improvements include a better heat shield, reduction in size of forward flaps, redesigns to the propulsion system, and new fuel feedline and ability to fly longer missions.
It is a big day for thew commercial space company, as it launched two private moon landers this morning too.
One of the missions could help Nasa astronauts land on the moon again, while the other will be the second attempt by Japanese company ispace after their lander crashed two years ago.
Nasa is paying 101 million dollars (£82.7 million) to Firefly for the mission and another 44 million dollars (£36 million) for experiments it will run while there.
The US space organisation’s Artemis programme, the successor to Apollo, aims to get astronauts back on the moon by the end of the decade.
Science mission chief Nicky Fox said on the eve of launch that before that can happen, ‘we’re sending a lot of science and a lot of technology ahead of time to prepare for that’.
SpaceX has been recovering the first-stage boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets for nine years, after delivering satellites and crews to orbit from Florida or California.
But they land on floating sea platforms, rather than back at the launch site.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: Fake deportation plane tickets put through post boxes of migrant families
MORE: The sound of a meteorite striking Earth has been captured for the first time
MORE: Inside the White House building where Elon Musk will work closely with Trump
