Elon Musk’s Spacex booster rocket catches fire after launching (video)

A booster rocket for SpaceX’s Star ship spacecraft exploded into flames during a ground-test firing, dealing a fiery blow to Elon Musk’s company.

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The Super Heavy Booster 7 prototype from a space business crashed during a test on Monday in Texas, as witnessed in a livestream captured by the website Nasa Spaceflight.

Yes, that’s really not good. After the early-evening explosion, Mr. Musk posted on Twitter that his team was evaluating the damage.

The explosion engulfed the base of the rocket in a ball of flames and heavy smoke and appeared to shake the video camera. However, there was no immediate indication of injuries.

‘Going forward, we won’t do a spin start test with all 33 engines at once,’ Mr Musk said on Twitter, explaining that the issue was was specific to the engine spin start test.

After the explosion, the booster remained standing upright, bolted to a test gantry.

The failure came in the midst of a daylong static fire test campaign of the booster, in Boca Chica, Texas.

The booster was equipped with an array of 33 Raptor engines for use in an upcoming unscrewed orbital test flight SpaceX hoped to launch later this year.

The explosion is likely to setback Musk’s aim of launching Star ship to orbit this year.

The Star ship is central to Nasa’s plans to return to the moon as well as Musk’s mission to make humans an ‘interplanetary species’ starting with Mars.

In June, SpaceX’s proposed Super Heavy rocket program in Boca Chica received approval pending dozens of conditions. It’s unclear if the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will look into the explosion.