Elon Musk's $3billion Starship designed to take humans to Mars has blown up on its first test launch shortly after takeoff.
The massive rocket, which has 33 main engines took off at 9.28am local time from the southernmost tip of Texas, US, near Boca Chica Beach, in what is being hailed as a success by the Tesla billionaire.
It blew up four minutes after takeoff as the booster tried to separate and fall into the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX said Starship experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation" but hailed the test as a success.
"I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won't be boring," Musk promised at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. "I think it's got, I don't know, hopefully about a 50 per cent chance of reaching orbit."
Although the rocket successfully launched and made it into the air, it was at the point where the booster tried to separate from the upper section that things went wrong.
The whole rocket started spinning and then exploded in a massive ball of fire.
SpaceX said Starship experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation”.
The European Space Agency’s director-general Josef Aschbacher congratulated SpaceX on the mission, hailing it “an impressive step”.
He tweeted: “There is room for all of us to learn from test launches. I look forward to the next steps.”
The launch was an unmanned round-the-world test flight of Space X's mammoth Starship, which is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.
After the explosion, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter: "Congrats SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months."
Witnesses say they saw six of the 33 thrusters not firing during the take off.
A spokesperson for SpaceX said: "As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation
"Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test
"With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary
"Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting first integrated flight test of Starship!"
It is the first launch with Starship's two sections together. Early versions of the sci-fi-looking upper stage rocketed several miles into the stratosphere a few years back, crashing four times before finally landing upright in 2021.
Another Starship is almost ready to go with the data gathered on this launch helping to improve the next one, which Musk said will be in the next few months.
Musk's company got the OK from the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday.
A previous attempt to take off on Monday was called off.
SpaceX cancelled the launch with just minutes left on the countdown after discovering a “pressurisation” problem.
“A pressurant valve appears to be frozen, so unless it starts operating soon, no launch today,” the SpaceX boss Elon Musk said on Twitter.
The towering first-stage rocket booster, dubbed Super Heavy, soared for the first time.
For this demo, SpaceX weren't going to attempt any landings of the rocket or the spacecraft.
The tech billionaire previously told a Twitter Spaces event: "It's the first launch of a very complicated, gigantic rocket, so it might not launch.
"We're going to be very careful, and if we see anything that gives us concern, we will postpone the launch.
"If we do launch, I would consider anything that does not result in the destruction of the launch pad itself to be a win."
The stainless steel Starship has 33 main engines generating 16.7 million pounds of thrust.
Given its muscle, Starship could lift as much as 250 tons and accommodate 100 people on a trip to Mars.
Musk hopes to use Starship to launch satellites into low-Earth orbit, including his own Starlinks for internet service, before strapping anyone in.
The test flight was meant to last 1 1 or 12 hours, and fall short of a full orbit of Earth.
The spacecraft would have continued eastward, passing over the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans before ditching near Hawaii.
Starship is designed to be fully reusable but nothing will be saved from the test flight. Harvard astrophysicist and spacecraft tracker Jonathan McDowell will be more excited whenever Starship actually lands and returns intact from orbit.
It will be "a profound development in spaceflight if and when Starship is debugged and operational," he said.
Elon Musk isn't the only mogul taking part in the newest space race.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos is readying a rocket made by his space company Blue Origin.
It is set to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the next year or so. NASA will use New Glenn to send a pair of spacecraft to Mars in 2024.
