Its successors will be even bigger and more powerful. In a livestreamed Starship update this past May, Musk said that the next iteration, V3, will be 408 feet (124.4 m) tall. One of his slides also depicted a variant described as "Future Starship," which will tower at a whopping 466 feet (142 m).

SpaceX's largest and most powerful rocket lifted off this Tuesday, August 26 at 7:30pm ET, reached an altitude of 192 kilometers, and embarked on a suborbital trajectory at more than 26,000 kilometers per hour towards the Indian Ocean, where the spacecraft splashed down an hour after liftoff.

SpaceX has long marketed Starship as a fully and rapidly reusable rocket that’s designed to deliver thousands of pounds of cargo to Mars and make life multiplanetary. But reusability at scale means a space vehicle that can tolerate mishaps and faults, so that a single failure doesn’t spell a mission-ending catastrophe.

The Starship megarocket checked every significant box during its 10th test flight on Tuesday evening (Aug. 26), according to SpaceX.

"Congratulations to @SpaceX on its Starship test. 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," NASA's acting administrator Sean Duffy wrote on X following the flight. "This is a great day for @NASA and our commercial space partners."

Elon Musk's company will try once again to launch its giant rocket after the test was scrubbed Monday due to weather conditions.

SpaceX executed the most successful flight test of its super-powerful Starship launch system to date, featuring Starship's first-ever payload deployment and a thrilling Indian Ocean splashdown. Today's 10th test flight followed three earlier missions that fell short of full success.

Two test flights of its Starship mega-rocket, in January and March, ended in fireworks as their upper stages broke apart over the Caribbean. A third test, in May, lasted a little longer, until a fuel leak doomed the rocket to an uncontrolled re-entry.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently published a nearly 500-page report on the potential impacts of Starship, the world’s biggest rocket created by SpaceX.