The SpaceX Falcon 1 launch attempt ended in loss of the vehicle. The company is investigating the cause of the failure.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk earlier described the risks in undertaking a new launch venture, comparing it to his prior experience in the software industry.
In a pre-launch press briefing last November before the first attempt to fly the Falcon 1, Musk acknowledged the difficulty in rocketry. Successfully launching a rocket requires everything to go right, and history is littered with failed inaugural flights. Musk compared the maiden flight with trying to develop perfect software.
"It is like...if you had a very complex piece of software that you test pieces of but you can't test the whole thing together until you ran it for the first time, nor could you test it on the exact computer that it had to run for the first time. But when it does run for the first time it can have no bugs. When was the last time you saw a piece of software that met that criteria?"
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