The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that SpaceX's Starship rocket, designed to eventually send astronauts to the moon and beyond, completed nearly an entire test flight to space on its third try Thursday but was destroyed during its return to Earth. A Reuters dispatch to The Globe says that during a live webcast of the flight, SpaceX commentators said mission control lost communications with the spacecraft during its atmospheric re-entry at hypersonic speed. The vehicle was nearing a planned splashdown in the Indian Ocean about an hour after launch from south Texas. A few minutes later, SpaceX confirmed that the spacecraft had been "lost," presumably either burning up or coming apart during re-entry or crashing into the sea. For reasons that were left unclear, SpaceX opted to skip one of the test flight's core objectives -- an attempt to reignite one of Starship's Raptor engines while it coasted in a shallow orbit. That milestone is considered key to its future success. The completion of many of Starship's intended flight objectives represented a milestone in the development of a spacecraft crucial to the growing satellite launch business of SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, and NASA's moon program.