Elon Musk wants his new rocket to revolutionise spaceflight. And that rocket, Starship, is now the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever built.

It’s also designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. His private company SpaceX, which is behind the creation, is hoping to develop a spaceship that can be used more like a plane than a traditional rocket system, being able to land, refuel and take off again a few hours after landing.

While there’s no exact date set yet for the rocket’s next flight, it could be as soon as this weekend – and SpaceX is expecting big things.

This will be Starship’s fifth outing, and all eyes will be on the landing phases – specifically, the return of the vehicle’s bottom part, the Super Heavy booster.

So far we’ve only seen what might be called a simulated landing at sea, or ‘splashdown’. This will be the first time we hope to see the booster return to the launch pad.

For a spacecraft to be reusable, it needs to be able to land safely.

The SpaceX founder has said they will try to catch the booster in mid-air on its return to Earth using the giant mechanical arms, or ‘chopsticks’, of the launch tower – or as Musk calls it, “Mechazilla”.

That’s something that’s never been done before, and eventually SpaceX want to catch the Ship – the top part of the vehicle – in the same way. But that won’t happen on the upcoming test flight.

None of Starship’s missions so far have been crewed, and there’s no plans to put people aboard for the next flight either.

But Musk and his company do have grand designs that the rocket system will one day take humanity to Mars.

A Mars trip isn’t on the horizon just yet. But the behemoth rocket already has some impressive specs, and dwarfs all of its predecessors.

Starship is a two-stage vehicle. The “Ship” is the uppermost part, and that sits atop a booster called Super Heavy.

Thirty-three engines at the base of this booster produce around 74 meganewtons of thrust. To put that into perspective, it’s almost 700 times as powerful as the thrust generated by the common passenger plane, the Airbus A320neo.

If you’ve flown with Aer Lingus, British Airways or Lufthansa, imagine the kick of taking off in one of those planes. Then multiply that by 700.

The vehicle has grown about a metre since its second test flight in June of this year, with Starship now measuring just over 120m in total.

This additional height comes from the Super Heavy booster itself being made 1m longer.

It’s also about twice as powerful as the Saturn V rocket which first took humanity to the Moon’s surface.

SpaceX says that power should be able to move a payload weighing at least 150 tonnes from the launchpad to low-Earth orbit.

Both the Ship and the Super Heavy booster are fuelled with a mixture of icy-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen fuel, known as methalox.

Starship has had four test flights up to now. During the first flight, the rocket system exploded early, before the Booster was able to separate.

It’s worth noting that such hiccups are part of SpaceX’s plan to speed up development by launching systems they know are not perfect and learning from the faults.

And each test has seen real progress – first with a hitch-free separation, and eventually a successful return, where both the Ship and the Booster made a controlled descent and hovered above the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Mexico respectively until splashing down.

Anyone watching nearby as the booster returns to Earth can expect a thunderous boom as it slows down from supersonic speeds.

While SpaceX plan to catch the booster with the launch tower, we won’t get a similar return of the top part – the Ship – this time. When we do, it shouldn’t look too different from the Super Heavy’s descent.

But since there’s no launch tower on Mars, or on the Moon for that matter, the Ship also needs to be able to land on its legs.

To do that, it manoeuvres itself horizontally as it starts to descend, in what Musk has called a ‘belly-flop’ manoeuvre. This increases the drag on the vehicle, slowing it down.

Once the Ship gets close enough to the surface, it’s then slow enough to fire its engines in a way that flips the vehicle into a vertical position.

The Ship then uses its rockets to guide itself down safely and land on a hard pad upon its landing legs.

All of this has been done by the Ship on its previous flight – apart from landing on a pad. So far it has only landed in the sea.

One of the purposes of test flying is to highlight problem areas, and the quick turnaround between each test flight means that weak links have to be redesigned at lightning speed.

If you get one thing wrong, the entire internal structure of the rocket could be melted by hot gases.

There are a few things Starship could be used for soon.

So far Musk has used his own rockets, like the Falcon 9 series, to launch his own commercial satellites, known as Starlink.

Those satellites have a short lifespan of around five years, and the flock in orbit needs to be constantly replenished just to keep the same number of satellites in space.

Nasa also wants to use Starship as part of its Artemis programme, which aims to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon.

In the more distant future, Musk wants Starship to make long-haul trips to Mars and back – about a nine month trip each way.

“You could conceivably have five or six people per cabin, if you really wanted to crowd people in. But I think mostly we would expect to see two or three people per cabin, and so nominally about 100 people per flight to Mars,” Musk said.

The idea is to send the Ship part of the vehicle into low-Earth orbit, and “park” it there. It could then be refuelled in orbit by a SpaceX ‘tanker’ – essentially another Ship without the windows – for its onward journey to Mars.

It’s also conceivable that Starship could be used to launch space telescopes.

The Hubble telescope is about the size of a bus, and the James Webb telescope is almost three times as big as that.

To put up thousands of satellites quickly, or a bigger telescope, you need a big rocket.

Finally, Starship has also been built to carry heavy loads needed to build space stations, and eventually, infrastructure for a human presence on the Moon.

A rocket that kicks 700 times harder than a passenger jet is bound to have some impact on the environment.

A draft environmental report by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released in July shows that the new licence SpaceX is applying for would allow them 25 launches of Starship per year.

The FAA say this would emit a total of 97,342 tonnes of CO2 equivalent – or 3,894 tonnes per launch.

In comparison, a typical car in the US emits about 4.6 tonnes of CO2 per year, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

If we crunch the numbers, that means one launch of Starship emits as much greenhouse gas as 846 cars would emit over the course of a year.

From a sheer numerical standpoint, that’s fairly insignificant compared to say, the commercial aviation industry.

But with Musk hoping to increase the number of launches to potentially hundreds per year in the future, those numbers could start adding up.

After more than 100 years hidden in the icy waters of Antarctica, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has been revealed in extraordinary 3D detail.

For the first time we can see the vessel, which sank in 1915 and lies 3,000m down at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, as if the murky water has been drained away.

The digital scan, which is made from 25,000 high resolution images, was captured when the ship was found in 2022.

It’s been released as part of a new documentary called Endurance, which will be shown at cinemas.

The team has scoured the scan for tiny details, each of which tell a story linking the past to the present.

In the picture below you can see the plates that the crew used for daily meals, left scattered across the deck.

In the next picture there’s a single boot that might have belonged to Frank Wild, Shackleton’s second-in-command.

Perhaps most extraordinary of all is a flare gun that’s referenced in the journals the crew kept.

The flare gun was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, as the ship that had been the crew’s home was lost to the ice.

“Hurley gets this flare gun, and he fires the flare gun into the air with a massive detonator as a tribute to the ship,” explains Dr John Shears who led the expedition that found Endurance.

“And then in the diary, he talks about putting it down on the deck. And there we are. We come back over 100 years later, and there’s that flare gun, incredible.”

Sir Ernest Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish explorer who led the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out to make the first land crossing of Antarctica.

But the mission was doomed from the outset.

Endurance became stuck in pack ice within weeks of setting off from South Georgia.

The ship, with the crew on board, drifted for months before the order was eventually given to abandon ship. Endurance finally sank on 21 November 1915.

Shackleton and his men were forced to travel for hundreds of miles over ice, land and sea to reach safety – miraculously all 27 of the crew survived.

Their extraordinary story was recorded in their diaries, as well as in Frank Hurley’s photographs, which have had colour added for the Endurance documentary.

The ship itself remained lost until 2022.

Its discovery made headlines around the world – and the footage of Endurance revealed that it is beautifully preserved by the icy waters.

The new 3D scan was made using underwater robots that mapped the wreck from every angle, taking thousands of photographs. These were then “stitched” together to create a digital twin.

While footage filmed at this depth can only show parts of Endurance in the gloom, the scan shows the complete 44m long wooden wreck from bow to stern – even recording the grooves carved into the sediment as the ship skidded to a halt on the seafloor.

The model reveals how the ship was crushed by the ice – the masts toppled and parts of the deck in tatters – but the structure itself is largely intact.

Shackleton’s descendants say Endurance will never be raised – and its location in one of the most remote parts of the globe means visiting the wreck again would be extremely challenging.

But Nico Vincent from Deep Ocean Search, who developed the technology for the scans, along with Voyis Imaging and McGill University, said the digital replica offers a new way to study the ship.

“It’s absolutely fabulous. The wreck is almost intact like she sank yesterday,” said Mr Vincent, who was also a co-leader for the expedition.

He said the scan could be used by scientists to study the sea life that has colonised the wreck, to analyse the geology of the sea floor, and to discover new artefacts.

“So this is really a great opportunity that we can offer for the future.”

The scan belongs to the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust who also funded and organised the expedition to find Shackleton’s ship.

The Endurance documentary is premiering at the London Film Festival on 12 October and will be released in cinemas in the UK on 14 October.

Additional reporting Kevin Church

Human activity is continuing to drive what conservation charity the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) calls a “catastrophic” loss of species.

From elephants in tropical forests to hawksbill turtles off the Great Barrier Reef, populations are plummeting, according to a stocktake of the world’s wildlife.

The Living Planet Report, a comprehensive overview of the state of the natural world, reveals global wildlife populations have shrunk by an average of 73% in the past 50 years.

The loss of wild spaces was “putting many ecosystems on the brink”, WWF UK head Tanya Steele said, and many habitats, from the Amazon to coral reefs, were “on the edge of very dangerous tipping points”.

The report is based on the Living Planet Index of more than 5,000 bird, mammal, amphibian, reptile and fish population counts over five decades.

Among many snapshots of human-induced wildlife loss, it reveals 60% of the world’s Amazon pink river dolphins have been wiped out by pollution and other threats, including mining and civil unrest.

It also captured hopeful signs of conservation success.

A sub-population of mountain gorillas in the Virunga Mountains of East Africa increased by about 3% per year between 2010 and 2016, for example.

But the WWF said these “isolated successes are not enough, amid a backdrop of the widespread destruction of habitats”.

Tom Oliver, professor of ecology at the University of Reading, who is unconnected with the report, said when this information was combined with other datasets, insect declines for example, “we can piece together a robust – and worrying – picture of global biodiversity collapse”.

The report found habitat degradation and loss was the biggest threat to wildlife, followed by overexploitation, invasive species, disease, climate change and pollution.

Lead author and WWF chief scientific adviser Mike Barrett said through human action, “particularly the way that we produce and consume our food, we are increasingly losing natural habitat”.

The report also warns nature loss and climate change are fast pushing the world towards irreversible tipping points, including the potential “collapse” of the Amazon rainforest, whereby it can no longer lock away planet-warming carbon and mitigate the impacts of climate change.

“Please don’t just feel sad about the loss of nature,” Mr Barrett said.

“Be aware that this is now a fundamental threat to humanity and we’ve really got to do something now.”

Valentina Marconi, from the Zoological Society of London’s Institute of Zoology, told BBC News the natural world was in a “precarious position” but with urgent, collective action from world leaders “we still have the chance to reverse this”.

Ms Steele said the report was an “incredible wake-up call”.

“Healthy ecosystems underpin our health, prosperity and wellbeing,” she told BBC News.

“We don’t think this sits on the shoulders of the average citizen – it’s the responsibility of business and of government.

“We need to look after our land and our most precious wild places for future generations.”