Its successors will be even bigger and more powerful. In a livestreamed Starship update this past May, Musk said that the next iteration, V3, will be 408 feet (124.4 m) tall. One of his slides also depicted a variant described as "Future Starship," which will tower at a whopping 466 feet (142 m).

SpaceX has long marketed Starship as a fully and rapidly reusable rocket that’s designed to deliver thousands of pounds of cargo to Mars and make life multiplanetary. But reusability at scale means a space vehicle that can tolerate mishaps and faults, so that a single failure doesn’t spell a mission-ending catastrophe.

SpaceX's largest and most powerful rocket lifted off this Tuesday, August 26 at 7:30pm ET, reached an altitude of 192 kilometers, and embarked on a suborbital trajectory at more than 26,000 kilometers per hour towards the Indian Ocean, where the spacecraft splashed down an hour after liftoff.