Elon Musk and SpaceX took their hottest phase towards Mars and the said intention of creating humanity a multi-planetary species … by capturing a big metal thermos into the Texas sky Tuesday night. 

The business done an pretty much 500-foot (150 meter) “hop” of its SN5 Starship prototype at its Boca Chica improvement facility at 5 p.m. PT. 

The nearly nine-story-tall exam craft ignited its solitary Raptor engine and slowly and gradually rose into the air in advance of then carefully returning to the floor and landing upright not much from wherever it took off.

For a instant right after the engine first ignited, it appeared as if SN5 was struggling to get airborne, but then it rose over its own smoke, hovered and came in for a tender landing. It traveled just a small fraction of the additional than 35 million miles Musk hopes the remaining Starship will traverse to acquire human beings to Mars. 

The lengthy-awaited reduced-altitude exam flight comes right after a handful of preceding prototypes failed without the need of at any time leaving the ground, mainly for the duration of pressurization checks. 

SN5 is created to be able to complete an orbital flight, but prior to pushing towards room, it to start with experienced to complete this comparatively little hop.

The about 98-foot-tall (30 meter) automobile is a stripped-down variation of what the remaining Starship spacecraft will glance like, without having the nose cone or fins. It is really 30 ft (9 meters) huge and it is really basically a fuel tank and a one Raptor motor topped with a body weight that simulates a payload. The resulting form is anything like a thermos several will recognize.

Musk tweeted this footage of the launch late Tuesday:

It can be been a massive August for SpaceX by now, with the firm’s Crew Dragon spacecraft correctly returning NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley from the Intercontinental Area Station and splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico in excess of the weekend. 

“Mars is searching authentic,” Musk tweeted right after the hop.

Crazy to consider that interplanetary vacation could possibly start out with this temporary and weird-searching flight. Can not wait around to see the upcoming large step on this very long journey.