SpaceX has launched another Starship rocket, but passed up catching the booster with giant mechanical arms.
Unlike last month’s success, the booster was directed to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
The catch was called off just four minutes into the test flight from Texas, US on Tuesday for unspecified reasons, and the booster hit the water three minutes later.
He did not specifying what went wrong.
At the same time, the empty spacecraft launched from Texas atop Starship soared across the Gulf of Mexico on a near loop around the world similar to October’s test flight.
Skimming space, the shiny retro-looking craft targeted the Indian Ocean for a controlled but destructive end to the hour-long demo.
It was the latest test for the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket that SpaceX and Nasa hope to use to get astronauts back on the moon and eventually Mars.
SpaceX kept the same flight path as last time, but changed some steps along the way as well as the time of day.
Among the new objectives was igniting one of the spacecraft’s engines in space, which would be necessary when returning from orbit.
There were also thermal protection experiments aboard the spacecraft, with some areas stripped of heat tiles to see whether catch mechanisms might work there on future flights.
Even more upgrades are planned for the next test flight.
Donald Trump flew in for the launch in the latest sign of a deepening bond between the president-elect and Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive.
SpaceX wants to eventually return and reuse the entire 400-foot (121-metre) Starship.
The recycling of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets flying out of Florida and California has already saved the company time and money.
Nasa is paying SpaceX more than four billion dollars to land astronauts on the moon via Starship on back-to-back missions later this decade.
Mr Musk envisions launching a fleet of Starships to build a city one day on Mars.
This was the sixth launch of a fully assembled Starship since 2023.
The first three ended up exploding.
