Besides being worth more than a few countries, Elon Musk is having a rather torrid time of late. His Space X program, you see, has hit something of a snag with the Falcon 9 rocket and their attempts to land it on a sea platform.

How did their latest attempt go? Awfully, as the rocket exploded less than three minutes into the flight and disintegrated into a massive cloud of smoke. You will want to skip all the way through to 21:15 in the above video to see take-off, then to 23:40 to see the drama unfold. Wired reports:

It’s not clear yet what caused the rocket to break up. At the time of “launch vehicle failure,” in NASA-speak, Falcon was still firing all of its nine first-stage engines, with the Dragon capsule and second stage Merlin vacuum engine attached. Right now, the NASA mishap and anomaly teams are trying to piece together video analysis of the flight path with the two minutes or so of data sent from the craft before it exploded.

The Dragon capsule was carrying more than 1.8 tons of supplies for the International Space Station, including a hard to replace space suit and a new docking station.

Hang in there Elon, if at first you don’t succeed, keep on spending money in the hope that you do.

[source:wired]