Thirteen is supposed to be unlucky. Nobody told SpaceX. One week after an engine failure cut short a launch attempt at Boca Chica, Texas, the company's Starship megarocket lifted off cleanly, arced across the upper atmosphere, and set itself down in the Indian Ocean in what engineers call a "soft splashdown" — a controlled, intentional plunge into the sea. The whole journey, from ignition to impact, took roughly one hour.

The flight was significant for several reasons at once, which is unusual even in the fast-moving world of commercial spaceflight. First, this was only the second outing for Starship V3, the latest and most powerful version of the vehicle. Engineers needed to know whether the lessons from its debut had actually been learned. It appears they had.

Second, the mission took place under a peculiar new spotlight: SpaceX recently became a publicly traded company, meaning investors around the world were watching every second of the countdown with a rather different kind of anxiety than the average rocket enthusiast. So what exactly went wrong last week? SpaceX confirmed that the abort was caused by an engine failure at liftoff — precisely the kind of problem that a rigorous test programme is designed to catch early. The fact that the team identified the fault, corrected it, and returned to the pad within days says something remarkable about the pace of iteration that has made SpaceX such an unusual organisation.