Elon Musk's Starship Rocket Exploded After Launch & SpaceX Described It In The Best Way

Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched the world’s largest rocket on Thursday, only to see it fail in spectacular fashion a few minutes later.

The whole thing played out in the Texas desert, where Musk’s rocket company hopes to one day launch humans on a Starship to Mars.

However, they’ll first have to figure out how to get that Starship into orbit without blowing up.

Thursday marked the first launch test for SpaceX’s Starship, which is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built on Earth.

The craft took off in a cloud of steam Thursday morning with no one on board.

It exploded a few minutes later while trying to make a move in the air, leading to a cheeky statement from SpaceX.

“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” the company tweeted.

In other words, it blew up before it could drop its rocket booster, although “rapid unscheduled disassembly” certainly paints a nicer picture of what happened.

“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.”

Musk also applauded the incident as a success despite the explosion.

"Learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months," he wrote.

SpaceX has been working at this for many years, and the company has a Wile E. Coyote-like track record of blowing up its rockets. However, no astronauts have actually been killed.

The latest setback triggered plenty of jokes on Musk's social media network.

"Is Twitter likewise undergoing 'a rapid unscheduled disassembly?'" asked political operative George Conway.

One user described it as "one of the all-time great euphemisms."

"In my day, we called it an explosion," wrote another.

The Starship stands 394 feet (120 metres) tall and is meant to be a fully reusable rocket to take humans to the moon, Mars and beyond, according to SpaceX.

That is, if they can figure out how to keep it from rapidly disassembling.