June 6 (Reuters) - SpaceX's giant Starship rocket

survived reentry through Earth's atmosphere on Thursday and

splashed down in the Indian Ocean as planned during its fourth

test mission after launching from south Texas.

The two-stage spacecraft, consisting of the Starship cruise

vessel mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster,

broke apart during its last attempt in March to survive a

blazingly hot reentry through Earth's atmosphere.

But the craft survived its reentry on Thursday, a SpaceX

livestream showed.

"Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship

made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!" SpaceX CEO

Elon Musk posted on social media after the splashdown.

Starship, stacked atop its Super Heavy booster, blasted off

Thursday morning from the company's Starbase launch site near

Boca Chica Village on the Gulf Coast of Texas. It is the latest

trial mission in the test-to-failure rocket development campaign

of Elon Musk's company.

The rocket system's first stage, called Super Heavy,

detached from the Starship upper stage three minutes into flight

dozens of miles above ground, sending the Starship on its way

toward space.

Super Heavy headed back toward land and appeared to achieve

a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico. Starship, meanwhile,

blasted its own engines to begin its trek around the globe

toward the Indian Ocean, a roughly 70-minute trip.

There, it began its free-fall back to Earth where it endured

the intense heat of atmospheric reentry - the crucial point at

which it failed in March.

Designed to be cheaper and more powerful than SpaceX's

workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, Starship - standing nearly 400 feet

(122 meters) tall - represents the future of the company's

dominant satellite launch and astronaut business. It is due to

be used by NASA in the next few years to land the first

astronauts on the moon since 1972.

Each Starship rocket has made it farther in its testing

objectives than previous tests before failing, either by blowing

up or disintegrating in the atmosphere.

The rocket's first launch in April 2023 exploded minutes

after liftoff some 25 miles (40 km) above ground. During the

next attempt in November, Starship reached space for the first

time but exploded soon after.

In its most recent flight in March, Starship made it much

farther and broke apart in Earth's atmosphere as it attempted to

return from space halfway around the globe.

The rocket's flight on Thursday was a repeat of its previous

test but with the aim to get farther.

The rocket is covered with hundreds of small black tiles

designed to protect against the extreme heat encountered while

diving through Earth's atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.

"The main goal of this mission is to get much deeper into

the atmosphere during reentry, ideally through max heating,"

Musk, CEO of SpaceX, wrote on social media on Saturday.

Much is riding on SpaceX's development of Starship, relied

upon by NASA as it aims to return astronauts to the moon in 2026

in a rivalry with China, which plans to send its astronauts

there by 2030. China has made several recent advances in its

lunar program, including a second landing on the moon's far side

in a sample retrieval mission.

Despite Starship's development appearing quicker than other

rocket programs, it has been slower than Musk originally

envisioned. A Japanese billionaire who initially paid to fly

Starship around the moon canceled his flight last week, citing

schedule uncertainties.

And Musk's drive to rapidly build Starship has endangered

SpaceX workers in Texas and California, a Reuters investigation

found.