A SpaceX Starship prototype exploded while trying to land on Wednesday.
The incident occurred after an otherwise successful test launch from the company's rocket facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
The Starship rocket destroyed in the accident was a 16-storey-tall prototype of the heavy-lift launch vehicle being developed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's private space company.
It is designed to carry human beings and 100 tonnes of cargo on future missions to the Moon and Mars.
The self-guided rocket blew up as it touched down on a landing pad after a controlled descent. The test flight had been intended to reach an altitude of 12,496 metres, propelled by three of SpaceX's newly developed Raptor engines for the first time. But the company left unclear whether the rocket had flown that high.
Mr Musk said in a tweet immediately after the landing mishap that the rocket's "fuel header tank pressure was low" during descent, "causing touchdown velocity to be high".
He said that SpaceX had obtained all the data needed from the test and hailed the rocket’s ascent phase a success.
SpaceX made its first attempt to launch Starship on Tuesday, but a problem with its Raptor engines forced an automatic abort just one second before lift-off.
The complete Starship rocket, which will stand 120 metres tall when mated with its super-heavy first-stage booster, is the company’s next-generation fully reusable launch vehicle – the centre of Mr Musk’s ambitions to make human space travel more affordable and routine.
Nasa awarded SpaceX $135 million to help develop Starship, alongside competing vehicles from rival ventures Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, and Leidos-owned Dynetcis.
The three companies are vying for future contracts to build the moon landers under Nasa’s Artemis programme, which calls for a series of human lunar explorations within the next decade.
Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX has been buying up residential properties in the Boca Chica village just north of the US-Mexico border in south-east Texas to make room for his expanding Starship facilities, which Mr Musk envisions as a future "gateway to Mars".
MATCH INFO
Barcelona 2
Suarez (10'), Messi (52')
Real Madrid 2
Ronaldo (14'), Bale (72')
Desert Warrior
Starring: Anthony Mackie, Aiysha Hart, Ben Kingsley
Director: Rupert Wyatt
Rating: 3/5
Saturday's schedule at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
GP3 race, 12:30pm
Formula 1 final practice, 2pm
Formula 1 qualifying, 5pm
Formula 2 race, 6:40pm
Performance: Sam Smith
The alternatives
• Founded in 2014, Telr is a payment aggregator and gateway with an office in Silicon Oasis. It’s e-commerce entry plan costs Dh349 monthly (plus VAT). QR codes direct customers to an online payment page and merchants can generate payments through messaging apps.
• Business Bay’s Pallapay claims 40,000-plus active merchants who can invoice customers and receive payment by card. Fees range from 1.99 per cent plus Dh1 per transaction depending on payment method and location, such as online or via UAE mobile.
• Tap started in May 2013 in Kuwait, allowing Middle East businesses to bill, accept, receive and make payments online “easier, faster and smoother” via goSell and goCollect. It supports more than 10,000 merchants. Monthly fees range from US$65-100, plus card charges of 2.75-3.75 per cent and Dh1.2 per sale.
• 2checkout’s “all-in-one payment gateway and merchant account” accepts payments in 200-plus markets for 2.4-3.9 per cent, plus a Dh1.2-Dh1.8 currency conversion charge. The US provider processes online shop and mobile transactions and has 17,000-plus active digital commerce users.
• PayPal is probably the best-known online goods payment method - usually used for eBay purchases - but can be used to receive funds, providing everyone’s signed up. Costs from 2.9 per cent plus Dh1.2 per transaction.
Avatar: Fire and Ash
Director: James Cameron
Starring: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana
Rating: 4.5/5
Libya's Gold
UN Panel of Experts found regime secretly sold a fifth of the country's gold reserves.
The panel’s 2017 report followed a trail to West Africa where large sums of cash and gold were hidden by Abdullah Al Senussi, Qaddafi’s former intelligence chief, in 2011.
Cases filled with cash that was said to amount to $560m in 100 dollar notes, that was kept by a group of Libyans in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
A second stash was said to have been held in Accra, Ghana, inside boxes at the local offices of an international human rights organisation based in France.
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