SpaceX has completed a mostly successful fourth test of its revolutionary new Starship rocket, a key step toward returning humans to the Moon and, maybe one day, landing on Mars.
The flight, integrated flight test 4 (IFT-4), lifted off today from SpaceXâs Boca Chica test site in Texas at 7:50 am Central time. Standing 233 feet (71 meters) tall, the rocket and its 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines roared to life, raising Starshipâthe largest rocket in historyâinto the sky over the Gulf of Mexico from the test site, called Starbase.
âTodayâs test was the clearest success to date,â says Abhi Tripathi, a former mission director at SpaceX and now an aerospace engineer at the Space Science Laboratory at UC Berkeley. âIt was amazing.â
Although one of the engines failed (Starship is designed with redundancy in mind in case of engine failures), the…
