By William Harwood | CBS News
With President-elect Donald Trump and newly-minted efficiency czar Elon Musk looking on, SpaceX launched the world’s most powerful rocket on its sixth test flight Tuesday, an up-and-down trip to space by a gargantuan Super Heavy-Starship to evaluate a variety of safety and performance upgrades.
Shattering the afternoon calm with an ear-splitting roar, the huge 30-foot-wide, 397-foot-tall rocket blasted off from Musk’s sprawling Boca Chica, Texas, manufacturing and test facility on the Gulf Coast near Brownsville at 5 p.m. EST, the opening of a 30-minute launch window.
With its 33 Raptor engines gulping 40,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and methane fuel per second, the Super Heavy-Starship majestically climbed away to the east over the Gulf of Mexico atop a brilliant plume of white-hot flame and a churning cloud of exhaust.
Two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, after pushing the rocket out of the dense lower atmosphere, the Starship’s six Raptor engines ignited to continue the climb to space while the Super Heavy booster fell away, reversed course and began flying back to the launch site.
The flight plan called for the Super Heavy to fly back to its launch pad for capture by a giant set of mechanical arms. But an issue of some sort, either with the rocket or the capture mechanism on the pad, prompted flight controllers to order a diversion to splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
