Elon Musk: New setback as SpaceX rocket goes up in flames

A rocket built by Elon Musik's spacecraft company, SpaceX, exploded on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, during a test on Thursday.

No-one was injured but a commercial satellite used by Facebook was destroyed in the blast. It was the second time in a little more than a year that SpaceX has lost a Falcon 9 rocket.

The event is unlikely to derail the emerging commercial space industry or SpaceX, according to analysts speaking to Florida Today. It quotes the appropriately named Dick Rocket as saying: "If anyone on this planet can recover from this, it's Elon Musk."

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However, the explosion marks another setback for the company and its internet entrepreneur boss Musk, according to Time. SpaceX's two failed launches in 15 months have heightened his reputation as a chief executive "who moves fast, even if it means breaking things".

It is also a blow for Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, who had planned to use the mission to help extend internet access in Africa, and for Spacecom, who owned the satellite.

"We don’t know whether the explosion stemmed from any sort of negligence on the part of SpaceX or anyone else, or whether it was simply the kind of thing that inevitably happens in the spaceflight business," writes Will Oremus for Slate.

Musk's long-term ambition for SpaceX is ambitious to say the least – he wants to "make humans a multi-planetary species". He is also the head of Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, and is chairman of solar energy provider SolarCity.

Time says Musk's involvement in three significant technology ventures is "like he's sitting inside three racing cars at once, behind the wheel of two of them, a backseat driver in the third". And while that can, on occasions, lead to inspiring results, at other times "it ends in a smoking wreck, as it did Thursday".