SpaceX is making progress on its next rocket

IT WAS, the wags of Twitter noted, the quickest relaunch of a SpaceX rocket yet. SN10, the latest prototype of the next-generation rocket, Starship, with which the company’s boss, Elon Musk, hopes to send people to Mars, took off from the company’s facility in Boca Chica on the Texas coast at 5.15pm local time on March 3rd. Six minutes and 20 seconds later, returning from an altitude of around 10km, it set itself back onto its landing pad, the first of the three prototypes to have attempted this test flight to achieve touchdown without blowing up.Or, at least, without doing so promptly. Eight minutes after landing, an explosion at its base threw the rocket into the sky again—this time blown into fiery pieces. But the spectacular coda should not diminish the fact that although the Starship programme may not achieve its goals quite as rapidly as Mr Musk would like, it is making real progress towards creating a fully reusable launch system more powerful than the Saturn Vs used in the Apollo missions.