SpaceX's Starship rocket has successfully completed its 10th test flight as Elon Musk and Nasa aim to send humans back to the Moon.

The landmark flight was launched from South Texas last night at 11:30pm GMT and lasted around an hour in flight.

The 123-meter-tall starship deployed mock Starlink satellites in space and tested new heat shield tiles on its plunge through Earth's atmosphere.

The deployment was hailed as successful, breaking a streak of previous testing failures, which resulted in explosions.

Nasa has chosen Elon Musk's Starship to put its first astronauts on the moon's surface since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The spacecraft is designed to be fully reusable, in an effort by Mr Musk to make space travel a regular occurrence.

The billionaire entrepreneur and founder of Tesla has long spoken about his ambition to create a settlement on Mars, seeing the colonisation of the red planet as vital for long-term human survival.

The Starship re-entered Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, utilising a variety of hexagonal heat shield tiles designed to require minimal refurbishment after each use.

SpaceX's Starship rocket successfully completed its 10th test flight

Speaking during a SpaceX live stream ahead of the launch, Mr Musk said: "There are thousands of engineering challenges that remain, for both the ship and the booster, but maybe the single biggest one is the reusable orbital heat shield."

The mission concluded with a steady, engine-guided vertical landing on the ocean's surface west of Australia, before exploding intoi a giant fireball understood to be triggered by a planned flight termination system.

The landmark flight was launched from South Texas on Tuesday