Story highlights
- The rocket self-destructed as a safety measure
- It's a common practice in the aerospace industry
- The experimental F9R can land on its feet and is designed to be reusable
- Reusable rockets could be useful for travel to Mars -- and back again
A rung on the long ladder to Mars broke Friday, when a rocket test in Texas ended in a midair ball of fire.
Debris from the unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 Reusable (F9R) rocket, which self-destructed less than 20 seconds after launch, rained down from the flames onto an open field outside of McGregor.
A hitch turned up during launch, and the "flight termination system automatically terminated the mission," SpaceX said in a statement.
"There were no injuries or near-injuries."
But it was a vivid firework for bystanders parked on a nearby country road -- and for their cellphone cameras. CNN affiliate KWTX reported the explosion on Friday and posted video.
SpaceX said it will look at flight data to determine what went wrong with the three-engine version of the rocket.
Photos: Traveling the universe by plane
Photos: Traveling the universe by plane
Traveling the universe by plane – Design image of the Skylon spacecraft taking off. This radical redesign uses a horizontal take off and landing system, and is 100% reusable, offering more frequent, cheaper and deeper flights into space.
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Photos: Traveling the universe by plane
Rapid response – Skylon could be used to deliver parts to a satellite.
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Photos: Traveling the universe by plane
Under the hood – The SABRE engine with a breakdown of its features.
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Photos: Traveling the universe by plane
Testing zone – Pre-cooler for the SABRE engine at Reaction Engines' UK site.
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Photos: Traveling the universe by plane
Intelligent design – How the Skylon fits together.
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Photos: Traveling the universe by plane
Sydney to London in the blink of a cat's eye – Concept for the 'Lapcat', a hypersonic plane for intercontinental travel that uses the SABRE engine.
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Photos: Traveling the universe by plane
Competition for reusables heating up – Dragon V2 reusable spacecraft from Elon Musk's SpaceX
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Photos: Famous firsts in space
Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to fly into space, was launched in a Vostok 1 space capsule on April 12, 1961. He spent 108 minutes orbiting the Earth before parachuting back to firm ground.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Less than a month after Gagarin's trip, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space. On May 5, 1961, Shepard piloted Freedom 7, the first manned mission in the Mercury program. His suborbital flight lasted a little more than 15 minutes.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Sputnik I, the world's first satellite, was launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. It orbited the Earth every 98 minutes.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Laika the dog is pictured aboard Sputnik II on November 13, 1957. She was the first animal to orbit the Earth. She did not survive her trip, but the mission provided valuable data that paved the way for the first human in space.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
John Glenn, aboard the Friendship 7, became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962. He also set a record as the oldest astronaut in space when, at the age of 77, he went on a mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1996.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Valentina Tereshkova, seen here with Yuri Gagarin, is the first woman to fly into space. She piloted the Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was the first human to die during a space mission. He died when the Soyuz 1 spacecraft crashed during its return to Earth on April 23, 1967. It was his second spaceflight.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission put the first humans on the moon. Neil Armstrong famously commemorated his first steps on the moon by saying, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, who was with Armstrong on Apollo 11, salutes the US flag on the lunar surface. Aldrin followed Armstrong and became the second man to walk on the moon.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
This is the first photograph of Earth's south polar ice cap. It was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 as the astronauts traveled to the moon in December 1972.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Skylab, the United States' first space station, orbited Earth from 1973 to 1979. The Soviet program had launched their first space station, Salyut, in 1971, and it stayed in space for 15 years.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
On July 15, 1975, Cold War adversaries temporarily broke the thaw when the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on their first joint space mission. Russia's Soyuz craft launched seven hours before the US Apollo craft, and the two vehicles linked up 52 hours after Soyuz lifted off. Here, the two crews pose for a portrait.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Soyuz 19 commander Alexei Leonov, left, shakes hands with Thomas Stafford, commander of the Apollo 18, on that first joint mission in 1975.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Gen. Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez, center, looks at a homemade rocket in Havana, Cuba, in 2009. Mendez became the first Latin American, the first person of African descent and the first Cuban to fly in space when he flew aboard the Soviet Soyuz 38 on September 18, 1980.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Columbia made the first orbital flight of NASA's space shuttle program on April 12, 1981. Here, crew members John Watts Young, left, and Robert Laurel Crippen hold a model of the orbiter in 1979.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Sally Ride became the first American woman to go into space when she was part of a crew aboard the space shuttle Challenger in June 1983.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Guion "Guy" Bluford was the first African-American to go into space. He was a mission specialist on the space shuttle Challenger in 1983.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
In February 1984, astronaut Bruce McCandless became the first astronaut to float in space untethered, thanks to a jetpack-like device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit. The units are no longer used, but astronauts now wear a similar backpack device in case of emergency.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
Jan Davis and Mark Lee were the first couple to go into space together when the husband and wife were astronauts on the space shuttle Endeavour in 1992.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
The private company SpaceX sent an unmanned capsule with supplies to the International Space Station on October 7, 2012. It was the first commercial space mission and the first of a dozen commercial cargo flights under a contract with NASA.
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Photos: Famous firsts in space
New close-up images of a region near Pluto's equator were released by NASA in 2015. The New Horizons spacecraft was launched in 2006. It's the first spacecraft to explore Pluto and its moons. The mission completed the reconnaissance of the classical solar system, and it made the United States the first nation to send a space probe to every planet from Mercury to Pluto.
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All about the landing
It's not how it flies up but how it comes down that makes the F9R a steppingstone to a Mars mission. The rocket has a landing gear -- four legs that stick out like an insect's. So did its even shorter predecessor, which bore the name Grasshopper.
Until now, American space rockets have never been designed to return in the same fashion or form as they departed. The bulk of the rocket was jettisoned into the ocean, or discarded in low orbit to fall back through Earth's cosmic incinerator, or left in the eternal void. Whatever you wanted to keep -- solid boosters, capsules, astronauts -- had to be lowered with chutes or glide in on a shuttle.
Not so the F9R. All of it, in one piece, slowly backs down to the pad it took off from, using its booster engines, and sets down gingerly on its feet.
That makes it reusable, a characteristic useful for a future mission to Mars -- if anyone plans to return home from there, that is.
Mars, here we come
A trip to the Red Planet is the visionary call of the space industry. Mars One, a Dutch nonprofit, already is taking applications for one-way space pioneers who would spend the rest of their lives on a permanent Martian settlement.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has a similar ambition: He foresees the human colonization of Mars and other planets as the next step in human evolution, according to the company's website.
There is also a less sexy but more immediate advantage to reusable rockets: They save tons of money. SpaceX's large Falcon 9 rockets cost about $54 million each, the company says.
That's roughly the price tag of a smaller pre-owned passenger jet in good shape. But a jet flies multiple times. Making rockets reusable would cut space flight costs enormously, SpaceX says.
That competitive edge could come in handy really soon.
SpaceX and three other firms -- Boeing, Blue Origin and the Sierra Nevada Corp. -- are racing to develop a "safe, reliable and cost-effective" means of transporting crew to low-Earth orbit, according a statement from NASA this week. The space agency plans to award, this month or next, "one or more contracts" for commercial transport to and from the International Space Station.
A short-hopper
F9R rockets don't rumble the earth with the kind of thunder that the space shuttles or Saturn V rockets once did, and the F9R is relatively small, comprising only one stage.
It's a sawed-off version of its parent, the Falcon 9, the first rocket from a commercial company to fly to the International Space Station, according to SpaceX.
Nine rocket engines fire up to boost the Falcon 9 into Earth's orbit. Just three propel the F9R, which has only flown to an altitude of 1,000 meters (3,280 feet). That's less than twice the height of New York's One World Trade Center -- a trivial feat for a rocket -- but coming back down from there in one piece is not.
Rocket science is, well, rocket science, even for small rockets sometimes, and failures in various stages of space missions happen regularly.
In mid-May, a Russian satellite launch went sour when the rocket veered off path, causing an emergency system to cut off propulsion. The rocket had traveled 100 miles high and reportedly burned up in the atmosphere on its way back down.
It was at least the fourth failure by a Proton-M rocket, a legendary workhorse of the Russian space program.
As Musk tweeted after F9R's self-detonation:
"Rockets are tricky ..."
