SpaceX's Starship, which is the most powerful rocket ever built, exploded during the first test flight.
The spacecraft is designed to send astronauts to the Moon, and Mars over the coming years and successfully blasted off at 1.33 pm Irish time from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.
Three minutes into the flight, the Starship capsule was due to separate from the first-stage rocket booster, however, separation failed and the rocket blew up.
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SpaceX tweeted: "As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation”.
Despite the disastrous end, SpaceX officials celebrated the clean launch and declared that it was in fact a partial success.
The US space agency, NASA, chose the Starship spacecraft to bring astronauts to the Moon in 2025 on a mission known as Artemis III.
This will mark the first trip to the moon since the Apollo programme concluded in 1972.
According to officials, Starship consists of a 50m tall spacecraft that is designed to carry crew and cargo that sits atop a 70m tall first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket.
SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 massive Raptor engines on the first-stage booster in February but the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket have never flown together.
The integrated test flight is intended to assess their performance together.
NASA will take astronauts to lunar orbit itself in November 2024 using its own heavy rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS), which has been in development for more than a decade.
Starship is bigger and more powerful than SLS and capable of lifting a payload of more than 100 metric tonnes into orbit.
It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice that of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
The plan for the integrated test flight was for the Super Heavy booster to separate from Starship about three minutes after launch and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship, which has six engines of its own, was to continue to an altitude of nearly 150 miles, completing a near-circle of the Earth before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii about 90 minutes after launch.
SpaceX foresees eventually putting a Starship into orbit, then refueling it with another Starship so it can continue on a journey to Mars or beyond.
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