SpaceX's Starship rocket has successfully completed its 10th test flight as Elon Musk and Nasa aim to send humans back to the Moon.
The landmark flight was launched from South Texas last night at 11:30pm GMT and lasted around an hour in flight.
The 123-meter-tall starship deployed mock Starlink satellites in space and tested new heat shield tiles on its plunge through Earth's atmosphere.
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The deployment was hailed as successful, breaking a streak of previous testing failures, which resulted in explosions.
Nasa has chosen Elon Musk's Starship to put its first astronauts on the moon's surface since Apollo 17 in 1972, with the new program called Artemis.
The spacecraft is designed to be fully reusable, in an effort by Mr Musk to make space travel a regular occurrence.
The billionaire entrepreneur and founder of Tesla has long spoken about his ambition to create a settlement on Mars, seeing the colonisation of the red planet as vital for long-term human survival.
The Starship re-entered Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, utilising a variety of hexagonal heat shield tiles designed to require minimal refurbishment after each use.
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SpaceX's Starship rocket successfully completed its 10th test flight
|REUTERS
Speaking during a SpaceX live stream ahead of the launch, Mr Musk said: "There are thousands of engineering challenges that remain, for both the ship and the booster, but maybe the single biggest one is the reusable orbital heat shield."
The mission concluded with a steady, engine-guided vertical landing on the ocean's surface west of Australia, before exploding into a giant fireball understood to be triggered by a planned flight termination system.
Mr Musk posted on X: "Great work by the SpaceX team!!"
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket built to date, made up of a booster called Super Heavy and the spacecraft Starship.
The landmark flight was launched from South Texas on Tuesday
|REUTERS
As the spacecraft launched, all 33 of the booster's engines fired up, and as planned, after about seven minutes, the booster separated from the spacecraft and fell into the Gulf of Mexico.
The spacecraft reached a maximum height of almost 200km above Earth.
Despite the first version of the rocket having five successful launches, all attempts to launch the newest version had previously ended in explosions.
Mr Musk aims to have Starship approved for human travel as early as next year and has also suggested it will start uncrewed flights to Mars in the next 12 months.
Elon Musk and Nasa aim to send humans back to the Moon
|REUTERS
Acting Nasa Administrator Sean Duffy congratulated SpaceX on social media: "Flight 10's success paves the way for the Starship Human Landing System that will bring American astronauts back to the Moon on Artemis III."
Artemis 3, the first crewed moon landing under NASA's Artemis program, which will utilise Starship, is scheduled to occur in 2027.
However, space analysts expect that date to be delayed.
SpaceX's next-generation rocket still needs major development before it can safely fly humans into space, including novel in-space refuelling demonstrations and safe landing on the lunar terrain.
Mr Musk expects to record around £11.5 million in revenue this year from the space organisation, which has swiftly churned out new Starship prototypes at Starbase, a sprawling and rapidly growing rocket industrial complex.