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Northern Ireland's Graeme McDowell, the 2010 US Open winner, is also in contention after a first round of 70, but his fellow countryman Tom McKibbin missed out.

Tuesday's test mission started off much better than those previous, Dr Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told the BBC.

Although for Dr McDowell, the "big failure" was that SpaceX could not maintain the Starship's "attitude - it's pointing direction - during the orbital coast".

Dr McDowell also predicted "more failures".

"No one else is even trying something on the scale of Starship," Dr McDowell said.