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On Tuesday, the largest rocket ever made took off again.

It's called Starship.

It's built by the commercial company SpaceX.

And this flight, its sixth test flight, was pretty amazing.

Starship flew partway around the world to the Indian Ocean where it hovered just above the water before splashing down.

And we have ships splashed down in the Indian Ocean.

Starship is the dream of the world's richest man, Elon Musk.

Musk wants to make humans a multi-planetary species.

I think this is just an incredibly important thing for the future of life itself.

He wants to start building a city on Mars.

And to do that, he needs starship.

The holy grail breakthrough that's needed is a rapid and completely reusable rocket system.

But building this rocket is having a real impact on Earth.

The launch site in Texas is located in the middle of one of the state's largest wildlife

sanctuaries. And environmentalists say every launch is causing damage.

So today on the show, we're going to talk to NPR's science correspondent Jeff Brunfield about everything Starship,

what the latest test shows it can do, what the environmental consequences of the test program might be,

...