Elon Musk's SpaceX Rocket Exploded During Launch, He Thinks He Knows Why

Falcon 9 experienced a problem shortly before first stage shutdown. Will provide more info as soon as we review the data.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2015

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Surely not the tweet billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk was hoping to send this morning, amidst the launch of his company SpaceX’s CRS-7 Falcon 9 rocket destined for the International Space Station. Its mission was to deliver supplies such as food to the ISS, but quite obviously that’s not happening. It was SpaceX’s third attempt at manufacturing a reusable rocket.

The rocket exploded without any warning from the technical team operating the launch just over two minutes after it left the ground. Here’s what it looked like.

VIDEO: Unmanned #SpaceX rocket carrying supplies to space station explodes after liftoff from Florida #Local6 pic.twitter.com/6pJsIYkOpW

— Mike DeForest (@DeForestLocal6) June 28, 2015

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Musk just took to Twitter to confirm the event the SpaceX team believes was a catalyst for the rocket’s demise.

That's all we can say with confidence right now. Will have more to say following a thorough fault tree analysis.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2015

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Man, what a total shame. A lot of hard work and even more money was invested into the Falcon 9 project (NASA provided $396 million while SpaceX provided over $450 million to fund rocket and capsule development efforts). Here’s full-legnth video of the failed launch from SpaceX’s control room. It includes some rocket data and telemetry readings, so maybe if you’re a novice astrophysicist or aerospace engineer you can chime in to Elon about what happened.