SpaceX launches the 11th test flight of its Starship rocket

SpaceX launched another of its mammoth Starship rockets on a test flight Monday, striving to make it halfway around the world while releasing mock satellites like last time.

Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — thundered into the evening sky from the southern tip of Texas. The booster was programmed to peel away and drop into the Gulf of Mexico, with the spacecraft skimming space before



descending into the Indian Ocean. Nothing was being recovered.

It was the 11th test flight for a full-scale Starship, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk intends to use to send people to Mars. NASA’s need is more immediate. The space agency cannot land astronauts on the moon by decade’s end without the 403-foot (123-meter) Starship, the reusable vehicle meant to get them from lunar orbit down to the surface and back up.