“After several disappointing failures, SpaceX’s Starship — the mammoth rocket that Elon Musk hopes to use to take people to Mars — made it all the way up to space and all the way back down to Earth during a 10th test flight on Tuesday night.

The largely successful mission was a likely relief to both SpaceX and NASA, suggesting that the development program is back on track. NASA is counting on Starship as the lander to put its astronauts on the moon in the coming years.

‘They appeared to achieve all of their test objectives,’ Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said in an interview. ‘I think this puts SpaceX back on track.’

On X, Sean Duffy, the acting administrator of NASA, congratulated SpaceX and said it was a great day for NASA and its commercial partners.

The flight could, at least for now, silence some critics of Mr. Musk and SpaceX who suggested the Starship project was suffering from serious engineering flaws.

Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Even more ambitiously, Mr. Musk says it will be fully reusable, with both stages returning to the launch site and caught by giant mechanical arms.

If SpaceX can pull off this vision, Starship could revolutionize the space industry, enabling the launching of bigger and heavier payloads at much lower costs.”

From New York Times.