Elon Musk's SpaceX launches Starship; booster misses landing

Elon Musk's SpaceX launched its giant Starship rocket to space from Texas on Tuesday, advancing the ship's spaceflight abilities but botching an attempt to bring its booster back to land as US President-elect Donald Trump watched from the company's rocket facilities.

The roughly 400-foot-tall (122-metre-tall) rocket system, designed to land astronauts on the moon and ferry crews to Mars, lifted off from SpaceX's sprawling rocket development site in Boca Chica, Texas.

The rocket's 233-foot-tall (71-metre-tall) first stage booster, called Super Heavy, detached from its second stage, Starship, at roughly 40 miles (62km) in altitude, sending the craft into space.

Super Heavy unexpectedly splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico instead of returning to land, where it was expected to fall into large mechanical arms attached to the tower it launched from. The last-minute diversion to water indicated something went wrong.

In space, Starship travelled around Earth for a daytime splashdown in the Indian Ocean roughly an hour later. It reignited one of its onboard engines in space for the first time, an early test of its maneuverability in space that SpaceX had tried but failed to do in past flights.

NASA chief Bill Nelson, who is expected to leave his role once Trump takes office in January, congratulated SpaceX in a post on X and said Starship's in-space engine reignition marked "major progress towards orbital flight."

Trump's attendance signals a deepening alliance with Musk, who stands to benefit from Trump's election victory. The billionaire entrepreneur and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is expected to wield extraordinary influence to help his companies and secure favorable government treatment.