A 16-story prototype for the heavy-lift launch vehicle being designed by the private space company of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to transport humans and 100 tons of cargo on potential missions to the moon and Mars was the Starship rocket destroyed in the crash.

As it touched down on a landing pad after a regulated descent, the self-guided rocket blew up. The test flight was to cross an altitude of 41,000 feet, powered for the first time by three of SpaceX's newly built Raptor engines. The business, however, left it uncertain if the rocket had flown that far.

Immediately following the landing mishap, Musk said in a tweet that the rocket's "fuel header tank pressure was low" during descent, "causing high touchdown velocity."

He added that SpaceX had obtained from the test "all the data we needed" and hailed the ascent phase of the rocket as a success.

On Tuesday, SpaceX made its first attempt to launch the Starship, but a problem with its Raptor engines forced an automatic abort just one second before liftoff.

The total Starship rocket, which when combined with its super-heavy first-stage booster, will stand 394 feet (120.09 meters) tall, is the company's next-generation completely reusable launch vehicle, the subject of Musk's ambitions to make human space exploration more accessible and routine.

In addition to competing vehicles from rival firms, Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, and Leidos-owned Dynetcis, NASA awarded SpaceX $135 million to help grow Starship.

Under NASA's Artemis initiative, which calls for a series of human lunar explorations over the next decade, the three companies are competing for potential contracts to build moon landers.

SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California, purchased residential properties in the village of Boca Chica just north of the U.S.-Mexico border in southeast Texas to make room for its expanding Starship facilities, which Musk sees as a future "gateway to Mars."

Musk has faced resistance from residents of Boca Chica who are reluctant to sell their homes.