SpaceX completes 11th Starship test

Elon Musk's SpaceX launched its 11th Starship rocket and landed it in the Indian Ocean west of Australia - the last flight before the company begins test-launching a new version of the giant rocket outfitted with more features for moon and Mars missions.

Starship, which includes the Starship upper stage stacked atop its Super Heavy booster, launched on Monday night from SpaceX's Starbase facilities in Texas.

After sending the Starship stage to space, Super Heavy returned for a soft water landing in the Gulf of Mexico seven minutes after liftoff, testing a landing engine configuration before blowing itself up.

Its last mission, in August, ended a streak of testing failures earlier this year.

Monday's flight was similar to the previous one, again deploying a batch of mock Starlink satellites, briefly re-lighting its engines in space and testing new heat shield tiles during its blazing hot return from space before splashing down west of Australia.

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said on X the mission was "another major step toward landing Americans on the Moon's south pole."

SpaceX, in future tests, expects to launch a more advanced Starship prototype tailored with upgrades essential for long-duration missions in space.

That includes docking adapters and other hardware changes key to orbital refuelling, a complex process involving two Starships docking in orbit to transfer hundreds of tonnes of super-cooled propellant.

The upgraded prototype "is really the vehicle that could take humans to the Moon and Mars", SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said at a conference in Paris last month.

"So that's really the one we want to get to."

Shotwell said she expected that iteration of Starship to fly by year's end or early next year.

Musk, SpaceX's CEO, has said he expects a refuelling mission with two Starships to occur next year.

Refuelling is one of many remaining testing objectives required before the rocket carries humans to the lunar surface, which is scheduled for 2027.

Multiple Starship tankers are needed to fill up one Starship with enough fuel for a moon landing under SpaceX's proposed moonshot plan.

That is part of a more than $US3 billion ($A4.6 billion) contract SpaceX won in 2021 under NASA's Artemis program, the US effort to put humans on the moon for the first time since 1972.

SpaceX's award puts it at the centre of a race to the moon between the US and China, which is aiming for its own crewed landing in 2030.

A panel of NASA safety advisers warned last month that meagre progress in developing elements of the rocket's lunar lander design risked setting back the US moon effort by years.

with AP