Hard To Do

...Rockets Of Any Size
After having seen the JAXA facilities and spoken to the folks who do rockets, I can appreciate how diffciult it actually can be to launch rockets. So when I noticed this, I thought it was worth posting.

March 25, 2006— The low-cost, built-from-scratch Falcon 1 rocket faltered a minute after liftoff on Friday, dashing the hopes of Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk that after four years and roughly $100 million, his creation would be spared the fate that awaits most debut rocket flights.

"We had a successful liftoff and Falcon made it well clear of the launch pad, but unfortunately the vehicle was lost later in the first-stage burn," Musk, the founder of California-based Space Exploration Technologies, wrote in a blog shortly after the 5:30 p.m. ET liftoff from a remote launch site in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean's Marshall Islands.

The cause of the failure was not known. Claimed in the accident was a $750,000 science satellite built by U.S. Air Force Academy cadets that was to monitor how space plasma disrupts communications and navigation satellite signals.

Musk, who made his fortune designing and selling the electronic services firms PayPal and Zip2, had said many times prior to the launch that it would take more than one failure to derail his plans to build and fly a family of low-cost, mostly reusable rockets.

At least the man is willing to try.
The Falcon rocket is powered by Liquid Oxygen and Kerosene. It is multi-staged and this version was to have two stages. If you read the article, they discuss a nine stage model.
Looking at the photo above, the control facilities seem awfully close to the blast off area...