They never said it was easy. The debut launch of Spaceloft XL from Spaceport America ended eleven kilometers above the ground when it decided to come back home the hard way. It had been carrying a small cargo of 50 experiments and other cargo and was supposed to distribute its payload about 110km above the Earth.

Engineers are still trying to find out what went wrong with Spaceloft. Their current hypothesis is "an unexplained aerodynamic effect" that brought down the six meter-long rocket. The company's still continuing with other launches planned this year, says UP Aerospace, which designed the rocket.

Spaceloft would have been the general public's first chance to gain access to space (even if it is only for small packages). UP Aerospace claims that it only takes a few hundred dollars to buy payload space on the rocket.

No, that's not a picture of the rocket exploding you see there. We're still looking for official pictures of the failed launch.