Rockets Are Tricky

It was a scary Friday night for SpaceX as one of their Falcon 9R rockets exploded shortly after launching during a test flight.

SpaceX told us that an "anomaly" was found as the rocket was heading up into the air and they made the choice to have it destroy itself. Nobody was was hurt and SpaceX said the flight stayed inside its designated area the entire time.

Elon Musk responded shortly after with this tweet:

Three engine F9R Dev1 vehicle auto-terminated during test flight. No injuries or near injuries. Rockets are tricky …

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 23, 2014

We're not sure right now exactly what made this particular flight so "tricky," but SpaceX is trying to put the crash in context so we can understand why this might not be as big of a deal as we might think.

Spokesman John Taylor said in a statement that this was a research and development project. And the whole point of the program is for these anomalies to happen so they can catch them ahead of time before they launch the rocket for real.

This sentiment is reflected in the aforementioned, rather blunt and casual, response by SpaceX leader Elon Musk.

The company also said this test was a particulary tough one, "pushing the limits of the vehicle further than any previous test."

Despite the casual nature of the response, the fact of the matter is that this is one of the more public failures for the company, and we'll wait and see what SpaceX said actually went wrong.