At 7:48 on a Tuesday morning in South Texas, the ground shook. Starship — the tallest, heaviest rocket ever assembled — lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase facility and punched through the sky. It was the 14th test flight. But this time, something genuinely new was about to happen.

It almost did not. One engine failed during the climb, and for a tense stretch mission controllers debated whether to abort. They decided to continue. The orbit-insertion burn fired as planned, and engineer Daniel Hewitt, narrating the live stream, said the words that made the control room erupt: "Starship is in orbit.

" The rocket had reached an altitude of roughly 275 kilometres — about the height at which the International Space Station circles the planet. Previous Starship flights had only ever traced suborbital arcs, the kind where a malfunction sends debris into the Indian Ocean well away from populated coastlines. Orbital flight is a different category of risk entirely, which is exactly why it had been avoided until now. Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester, called the achievement "the beginning of the transition from the testing and development phase to becoming a working vehicle.

" That vehicle, he suggested, would one day deliver the heavy payloads needed to send humans back to the moon — and eventually toward Mars. NASA has already selected Starship as the lander for its Artemis programme, meaning this flight matters far beyond one company's ambitions.