Late on Thursday night, at a launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, SpaceX performed the first flight test of its next-generation Starship rocket, which may one day carry humans to Mars. This time around, the prototype vehicle, dubbed Starhopper, was supposed to stay close to home: The plan was for it to fire up its Raptor engine, rise to an altitude of about 60 feet, move sideways a few yards, and land.

When launch time came, smoke obscured any view of the rocket. But when the smoke cleared, Starhopper was back on the ground, not far from where it had started. Elon Musk confirmed the successful hop on Twitter, writing, “Water towers *can* fly haha!!” (As it happens, a water tower would have come in handy: When the rocket landed, it promptly started a fire near the launchpad.)

“This particular hop is one in a series of tests designed to push the limits of the vehicle as quickly as possible to learn all we can, as fast as we safely can,” a SpaceX spokesperson said. It’s the first step toward test flights in the upper atmosphere, which Elon Musk said would “hopefully” occur in the next few months.

Starship looks as though it was plucked straight from the pages of a pulp science fiction novel. Bullet-shaped and clad in stainless steel, it will ultimately be nearly 200 feet tall. The water-tower-like Starhopper, however, is much shorter: In January, strong winds toppled the rocket’s nose cone, so SpaceX decided to do the first hop without it. The nose cone won’t be necessary until later anyway, when it will encase the rocket’s payload and handle the crushing aerodynamic forces of higher-altitude tests.

Thursday’s flight was originally scheduled to take place early last week, but a fireball on the launchpad during testing forced SpaceX to delay it. Although video of the fireball seemed to show Starhopper being consumed by flame, the prototype emerged mostly unscathed. As Musk pointed out on Twitter, a big advantage of stainless steel—as opposed to carbon fiber, which was the original plan—is that it’s “not bothered by a little heat.” Still, the company took time to make sure everything was functioning normally leading up to its second attempt.

On Wednesday, SpaceX once again fueled Starhopper for its first flight, but ended the test just seconds after the engines ignited. The rocket never left the ground; it was engulfed in a large cloud of smoke and flame that emanated from the top of the vehicle. Although SpaceX did not announce the cause of the mishap, there were no explosions and Starhopper wasn't significantly damaged.