Starship is a super heavy-lift launch vehicle developed by SpaceX. Standing at 119 m (390 ft) tall, it is the tallest and most powerful launch vehicle ever flown, and the first intended to be fully reusable.

The Starship launch vehicle is made up of the first-stage Super Heavy booster and the Starship second stage. The second stage functions as a self-contained spacecraft for carrying crew or cargo once in orbit. Both rocket stages are powered by Raptor engines, which burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants in a highly efficient full-flow staged combustion power cycle. After completing their flight, both rocket stages will be recovered, including the Super Heavy booster which would be caught by the launch tower’s mechanical arms.

Starship is planned to have a payload capacity of 150 t (330,000 lb) to low Earth orbit in its fully reusable configuration and 250 t (550,000 lb) to low Earth orbit if fully expended. It is designed to be flown multiple times to spread out the cost of the spacecraft. The spacecraft is planned to be refuelable in orbit before traveling to destinations that require more change in velocity to reach them, such as the Moon and Mars. Proposed near-term applications for Starship include delivering astronauts and large satellites to Earth orbit, building the Starlink internet constellation, and facilitating the exploration of the Moon (Starship HLS) and Mars.

Plans to create a heavy-lift launch vehicle at SpaceX date back to 2005. The methane–oxygen engines (later named Raptor) were in development since 2012 and the plan for building the launch vehicle was announced publicly for the first time in 2016. The development program for Starship follows an iterative and incremental approach, involving frequent prototype construction, testing, and refinement, including low and high-altitude flight tests. The first orbital flight test attempt took place on April 20, 2023 and resulted in the loss of the vehicle before stage separation—destroyed by the on-board flight termination system after instability caused by the failure of several Raptor motors.

Alaskan residents admiring the Northern Lights were taken by surprise when a rather sizeable spiral suddenly passed though the night sky. The wondrous event, which reportedly occurred a few hours after midnight this past Saturday, was spotted by both skywatchers observing the aurora borealis as well as bewildered witnesses who unexpectedly caught a glimpse of the curious ‘light show.’ Shortly thereafter, social media was flooded with photos and videos of the fantastic event with some wondering if the weird spiral could have been alien in nature. However, the mystery surrounding the strange shape was soon solved when it was determined to have had a terrestrial origin.

The peculiar scene, space physicist Don Hampton told the Associated Press, was the result of a SpaceX rocket that had been launched hours earlier from California. While passing over Alaska, he explained, it released excess fuel which subsequently turned into water vapor that in turn reflected sunlight. “When you’re in the darkness on the ground,” Hampton said, “you can see it as a sort of big cloud, and sometimes it’s swirly.” The incident over Alaska is not the first time that a SpaceX launched has spawned a proverbial viral spiral as a similar event occurred over New Zealand in June of last year.