Watch SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket explode in mid-air

Space X’s Falcon 9 programme has had its first ever failure. Two minutes and 19 seconds after taking off on Sunday, a Falcon 9 rocket, destined for the International Space Station exploded in mid-air.

The rocket was carrying cargo and no humans were aboard. As The Verge notes, this is the first time a Falcon 9 has failed in 18 missions.

According to the US-based tech news site, the launch was also intended to serve as a third test in SpaceX’s quest to make a reusable rocket. Three minutes into the launch, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket was supposed to separate and land itself on a drone ship out to sea.

The private space company is scheduled to test the landing system is on 9 August with the launch of the Jason 3 satellite. Rather than a sea landing, Space X is set to try and land Falcon 9 at Vandenburg Airforce Base. It’s unclear however whether this explosion will affect that launch date.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has, as usual, been at the forefront of communications around the explosion. So far, it seems that the company knows what went wrong, but not why it did so.

There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2015

Cause still unknown after several thousand engineering-hours of review. Now parsing data with a hex editor to recover final milliseconds.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 29, 2015

Among the goods onboard the Dragon cargo ship affixed to the Falcon 9 rocket were two Microsoft Hololens devices, which the astronauts onboard the station were going to use to communicate with mission control and to augment their experiment as part of a programme called Sidekick.

For its part Microsoft, seems determined not to abandon the programme, with CEO Satya Nadella tweeting out his support.

Space is hard… @NASA we're with you and ready to try again!

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) June 28, 2015

At this stage, it’s unclear whether any of the cargo survived, with the Dragon capsule appearing to blast away from the explosion.