Elon musks grasshopper rocket makes its highest leap to date – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
Skip to main content

Elon Musk’s Grasshopper rocket makes its highest leap to date

SpaceX lateral motion screengrab (Credit: SpaceX/YouTube)
SpaceX lateral motion screengrab (Credit: SpaceX/YouTube)
SpaceX lateral motion screengrab (Credit: SpaceX/YouTube)
Casey Newton
is the editor of the Platformer newsletter and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast.

Elon Musk’s quest to build a rocket that can be reused after delivering its cargo is getting closer to the atmosphere’s upper reaches. A new video from SpaceX shows the Grasshopper rocket reaching its highest point to date: 744 meters. The test flight comes a month after Musk demonstrated the Grasshopper launching, flying 300 feet laterally, then returning to the launchpad and landing vertically. SpaceX has a long way to go before its reusable rockets are ready to deliver their cargo to the cosmos. But combined with the successful test flight of a more powerful Falcon 9 rocket last month, Musk has said “I think we now have all the pieces of the puzzle to bring the rocket back home.”

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.