.

And lift off. Part-were successful, SpaceX's Starship rocket did take off from Boca Chica in Texas, but shortly after, mission control lost contact with the booster and is presuming rocket failure. Let's get more on that. Spacex launched its massive starship rocket this morning, but as I say, it lost contact after just eight minutes. The top of the rocket did successfully separate from the booster, which was pretty exciting, but contact was lost then with the main rocket. The Elon Musk company still hailed it as a success. The rocket flew further than the fail-first attempt in April. So some progress, and it all seemed to be going rather well until this happened.

News of our super heavy booster. And as you can the super heavy booster has just experienced a rapid, unscheduled disassembly. However, our ship is still underway.

With all six- Let's.

Get some more on it, shall we? With Emma Getty, she is editor of Spacewatch Global. Emma, if you'll pardon the pun, I found it all very uplifting. Amid all the news that's going on around the world at the moment, I do like a rocket launch. But there was a part where I thought this is going to work, and then it just all seemed to unravel pretty quickly.

Yes, everybody loves a good rocket launch. We did have eight minutes of glory, and then after that, we had a disappointed news because we lost contact. But I think you have to put it in perspective. This launch lasted eight minutes instead of the first one in April, which was only four minutes. I think in the end, was still we can call it a success.

Yeah. Jonathan Amos, our science correspondent, was telling me earlier that they like to test early. They don't care so much if it goes wrong, so long as they learn lessons from it. What do you think they'll have learned from this launch?

Well, this is correct because the approach of SpaceX is a Starship development program, so they follow this iterative and incremental approach. So destruction is part of the game. In this specific flight, they improved massively from the first one because if you remember in April, they had three engines that they even start, they aborted before lift off, while this time all the 33 engines, which are called Raptor engines, they were all up and running during lift off. And this allowed Starship to actually reach what we call first stage separation, which is the most interesting part. This is what they wanted to test because it's when the super heavy booster, which is their usable part, actually detach from the Starship. I think this is what they really wanted to gain data on. In fact, I think they said it. They said that this was the part that was really most interesting for them. After that, Starship just carried on and you made the first stage separation. They also tested something that they call Hot Staging. This was the first time they tested it and is a method for separating the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket after the lift-off when the Super Heavy is still burning.

It's still finishing most of its fuel and is ready to break away.

This.

Is the most important.

-yes. I mean, scale is the important thing here. This is a much bigger rocket than the Falcon project that they run to the space station. What is it intended to do?

Well, I believe from Elon Musk's words, this is intended to take us to Mars to occupy or colonize Mars, depending on which word you prefer. The idea is to build the heaviest rocket possible that actually can bring humanity, citizens of our planet, onto another planet in the safest way possible.

Yeah. If it carried 100 tons, just to put that in perspective, it took them multiple, multiple launches to build the space station. I think that's around 400 tons. You get an impression, actually, of what it could carry in terms of setting up a base on the moon, which would be the first port of call. This is crucially important.

Absolutely, it is crucially important because one of the biggest troubles in space is actually bringing stuff outside of our atmosphere. So we need to make it as efficient as possible. And this is also part of the idea of startup ship being a huge cargo able to bring as much material, payload, scientific equipment, humans, as many as possible in one go. So to cut on the prices of multiple launches.

He is the wealthiest. He is part of this strategy. I mean, Mr. Musk is the wealthiest man in the world, depending on which day it is. But how much does this all cost? And is he the only one bankrolling it? Or are they so impressed with the whole program that there are multiple investors now coming in?

No, absolutely, he's not the only one. He's backed up by the government, he's backed up by NASA, he's backed up by US government and is back up by a venture capital's investor. So he's not the only one investing in this. He's the one that bet on it the most 20 years ago, but at the moment he's been so successful that he's definitely not the only one. But I think the most interesting question now is to understanding how many attempt, how many failures they can have before actually starting to have some, let's call it financial troubles.

Well, they've still got two or three rockets to go, which are largely towards the end of production. So we will see when they decide to go again. Emma Gatti, lovely to talk to you. Thank you.

Thank you very much.