Three, two, one.

Jubilation as the world's biggest and most powerful rocket launched into the sky over Texas.

We are two plus 40 seconds into the flight on Starship.

This the second test flight of SpaceX's Mega Rocket Starship designed to one day send up to a hundred astronauts at a time on interplanetary flights. The first attempt was back in April, but four minutes in, disaster. The hope this time was to get the two-part rocket ship even further. So when the booster that had powered the ship towards space exploded after a few minutes, no one seemed too phased.

As you can see, the Super Heavy Booster has just experienced a rapid, unscheduled disassembly. However, our ship is still underway.

And the positive spin only continued when contact was lost altogether around eight minutes after lift-off, with the team 90 miles below back at Starbase all smiles.

Such an incredibly successful day. Even though we did have a rud or rapid, unscheduled disassembly, we got so much data and that will all help us to improve for our next flight.

The chief of the American Space Agency, NASA, tweeted his congratulations. Space flight is a bold adventure, demanding a can-do spirit and daring innovation, wrote Bill Nelson. Today's test is an opportunity to learn, then fly again. At over 120 meters long, the Starship is more than twice the length of a space shuttle. So far, the tests have been unmanned. But back in 2014, a pilot was killed and another injured as a Virgin Galactic spaceship too crashed in the California Desert. It didn't slow the quest to conquer space tourism, with the commercial sector taking risks where NASA would never dare.

Spacex is very well known for fast and furious, so they do very rapid tests where they accept that there will be lots of failures. There's lots of risk. But as a result, they're much quicker in actually developing something that does work.

Back at base, the big boss was watching. Elon Musk keen to see progress. This time, the rocket did make it to space and the days are reduced will be poured over. But there's no doubt it's an expensive learning curve. Emma Birchley, Skynews.