Starship 12 blasts off as SpaceX tests world’s most powerful rocket set to land astronauts on the moon: Watch LIVE

The largest and most powerful rocket in history has been launched as Elon Musk’s SpaceX embarks on a critical test before humans return to the moon’s surface.

Starship Flight 12 took off from the aerospace company’s launching pad in Starbase, Texas Friday night.

While the craft successfully made it into space, the launch was not perfect, as Starship lost the use of one of its six new ‘Raptor’ engines. It was forced to burn its remaining five engines longer to compensate. 

The fully reusable, two-part spacecraft, designed to carry people and cargo into space, does not have a crew and is fully controlled remotely by SpaceX.

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Flight 12 is testing the new Starship Version 3, the company’s latest design which featured several improvements based on lessons from earlier test flights, including more efficient and powerful Raptor 3 engines, better fuel systems and more heat protection.

Musk and his team are eyeing this version of Starship as the one NASA astronauts will use as their lunar lander for the Artemis program. It will carry astronauts to the moon’s surface as soon as 2028 when Artemis IV is scheduled to take off.

SpaceX’s long-term dream for Starship V3 is to send both humans and cargo to Mars to build the first self-sustaining city on the Red Planet. Starship was designed to be refueled in orbit so it can make the long journey to Mars.

Friday’s test flight is a suborbital mission, meaning it will not go into full orbit, and was said by SpaceX to be the first pivotal step in testing how the new Starship’s hardware behaves under real flight conditions.

This is a breaking story. More details to follow. 

Starship 12 featured two key parts, the ‘Super Heavy,’ the bottom booster stage with 33 powerful Raptor engines, and the Starship, the upper part sitting on top of the booster that has its own engines. The spacecraft is what would carry astronauts to space.

Overall, the rocket stands as tall as a 50-story building.

The test flight had several key goals, starting with a successful liftoff from Starbase, Texas at 6.30pm ET.

From there the Super Heavy booster separated after a few minutes of flight, conducted a ‘boostback’ burn to slow itself down and then performed a landing burn to splash down gently in the Gulf of America.

Unlike previous SpaceX missions, this rocket booster did not try to land back at the launch site as the company’s other reusable rockets have.

Meanwhile, the upper Starship stage continued into space, where it successfully deployed 22 dummy Starlink satellites 20 minutes into the flight.

Cameras inside the craft captured the moment as each communications panel slid out of the cargo hatch and was sent off into orbit as the SpaceX crew back on Earth cheered and chanted ‘USA’ from the company’s control center in Texas.

SpaceX did note during the flight that a scheduled restart of one of the craft’s engines while in space was cancelled due to the loss of one of Starship’s six engines during launch.

Flight 12 will then re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at high speed, testing its heat shields, in which one panel was deliberately removed to see how the craft would hold up under such stress.

The whole flight is scheduled to take roughly one hour.

Starship 12 was initially set to launch on Thursday, but the mission was postponed after several attempts to fix a mechanical issue just 40 seconds from takeoff.

Musk revealed after the failed attempt that a hydraulic pin holding the tower arm in place did not retract from the craft.