Austin American-Statesman SpaceX launched another test flight of its Starship rocket on Tuesday, foregoing an attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster at the launch site near Brownsville, Texas, but successfully relighting one of its engines in space for the first time. In its sixth test flight of Starship, SpaceX was hoping to repeat the catching maneuver via mechanical arms that it successfully completed on Oct. 13. “This is only the sixth of many future flight tests of Starship before it becomes fully operational, and we tend to do our testing out in the open, just like today, and that means people sometimes see when our hardware doesn't perform as we planned during that testing, and that's OK,” a representative said on SpaceX’s live stream before launch. The default, which SpaceX wrote in a statement prior to Starship’s sixth test flight, is to ensure the safety of the team and public and was due to either unhealthy systems on the booster and tower or a missed manual command from the mission’s flight director. The manual command must be sent prior to the completion of the boostback burn, SpaceX wrote, or else the booster defaults its flight back to land in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX successfully relit one of its Raptor engines while in space for the first time, an important feat as SpaceX prepares to expand its reach to crewed missions to Earth’s orbit, the Moon and to Mars. Starship successfully landed in the Indian Ocean utilizing a maneuver to flip the craft. The feat, while accomplished previously, was noteworthy as SpaceX specifically designed this flight to test the vehicle's limits. SpaceX removed about 2,100 tiles from Starship's heat shield in order to determine how much heat the ship could or could not withstand. “To put it as bluntly as possible, do not be surprised if this is not a smooth flight to splashdown,” a representative said on SpaceX’s live stream before launch. “Today, we are intentionally looking for how far we can push and discover the vehicle's true limits as we plan for future ship return and catch and even though ship recovery is not expected today, the telemetry and data we receive all the way to the end is what we're looking for and what will help us get to a rapidly reusable starship of the future.” SpaceX’s stated goal is to one day recover and reuse boosters and spacecrafts for future missions. With the successful landing, SpaceX is a step closer to being able to capture the Starship spacecraft in the same way as it caught the booster in the fifth flight test and reuse it for later missions. Starship, SpaceX’s nearly 400-foot-tall system, is a two-stage mega rocket with the Starship spacecraft stacked on top of the Super Heavy booster. The spacecraft, according to SpaceX, is intended to one day carry crews and cargo to orbit Earth, land on the Moon and Mars. Starship is anticipated to play a key role in NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to bring humans back to the moon as soon as 2026. The Artemis program hopes to use the missions to the moon as a steppingstone to bringing humans to Mars, a goal that Musk has frequently voiced. SpaceX posted on X minutes before Starship’s launch Tuesday that it had recently tested heat shield materials for a possible Starship mission to Mars in 2026. With SpaceX founder Elon Musk at the launch was President-elect Donald Trump, who confirmed his attendance on social media Tuesday afternoon. “I’m heading to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever to be elevated, not only to Space, but simply by lifting off the ground,” Trump wrote. Musk has continued to cement himself as a close confidant of Trump, joining him for meetings with foreign leaders, golfing with his family in Florida, visiting New York for a UFC match together and meeting with Republican members of Congress in Washington D.C. Musk’s super PAC donated an estimated $200 million toward Trump’s election and joined him on the campaign trail and on election night. Trump announced last week that he plans to create a Department of Government Efficiency — named in reference to Musk’s cryptocurrency — with Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy leading the effort to cut spending in the federal government. The department, according to Trump’s announcement, will function outside of the federal government, and so its power and oversight over government spending is not known. Flight path and previous flight tests At liftoff, the Super Heavy booster fires up its 33 Raptor engines to propel the Starship spacecraft. The booster uses the majority of its fuel before detaching from the spacecraft. The booster then is intended to make its course back to the launch site where it would be caught by mechanical arms. On Oct. 13, SpaceX’s fifth test flight of Starship drew international attention as the 232-foot-tall Super Heavy booster flew back to its landing structure and was caught with what SpaceX calls “chopsticks” midair. “Starship’s fifth flight test was a seminal moment in iterating towards a fully and rapidly reusable launch system. … The success of the first catch attempt demonstrated the design feasibility while providing valuable data to continue improving hardware and software performance,” the company wrote in a statement about the sixth launch on Tuesday. SpaceX decided to forego the recapture of the booster due to safety risks and conditions. “We'd much rather find the bugs and limits now during testing than later on with more on the line,” a SpaceX representative said during the live stream. “While we do determine an acceptable level of technical risk on our vehicle and pad to learn as fast as possible, we accept no compromises when it comes to the safety of the public or our team.” Starship’s upper stage then uses six of its own engines to fly into space before entering a coasting phase. SpaceX did reignite one of Starship’s Raptor engines in space for the first time. The engines had previously been relit nearing liftoff, landing and splashdown but never in space before Tuesday. Had one of the engines not lifted, Starship would still have traveled the same course as the fifth flight test and landed in its intended location. On Tuesday, Starship’s upper stage flew the same trajectory as in October, landing in the Indian Ocean successfully after using its engines to flip the ship. Along with a reattempt of the fifth flight test, Tuesday’s test also looked at new secondary thermal protection materials and flew at a “higher angle of attack” in its final descent to gain more data on future landing possibilities, SpaceX wrote in the announcement of the sixth test. In the fourth flight test of Starship in June, the spacecraft shed heat tiles meant to protect it from severe temperatures. After the mission, Musk said the spacecraft landed six miles from its intended splashdown location in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX reworked the entirety of Starship’s heat shield after that mission. “Every one of these flights is a step closer to a fully operational starship that will take us beyond Earth orbit, and with our pace of rapid iteration here, the Moon and Mars are not nearly as far in the future as you may think,” a representative on SpaceX’s live stream said Tuesday.