Here's one for the history books; the Eris spacecraft became the first orbital rocket to launch from Australian soil, and exploded 14 seconds after takeoff.

We're a proud people us Aussies, but maybe we should stick to wrestling crocodiles and breakdancing.

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/australias-1st-orbital-rocket-gilmour-spaces-eris-fails-on-historic-debut-launch

That's what you get when a koala is supposed to be the captain.

No wonder, it tried to take off upside-down!

It got off the ground at least, that's the first step. Stayed upright as well. However space is a lot further up :p

I assumed exploding after the take-off part was the success they were hoping for.

That is like the fastest rocket explosion after takeoff, right? We can say we got a new record!

In the 1960s there was the rocket that got off the pad and fell back down about 1-2 seconds later and exploded.

Then there are all the Elon rocket explosions, some of which as they fired up to take off, like the Starship 10 attempt number 1 a month ago. Instead of the next flight being called 11, Elon has made sure it's going to be called 10.

And Australia should feel bad, Elon's rockets frequently explode. Starship 9's rocket blew up on landing, and the ship itself malfunctioned broke up over the Indian Ocean, so technically multiple explosions occurred: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HgC5d2sJAj8.

And Starship 8 also blew up during flight.

So did Starship 7 exploded very similarly.

In fact, only 2 out of the 10 Starship launches were successful (partially successful, as they still had to self-destruct both of those). Elon has a very long history of space explodation:

Hey, you got to start somewhere. Next time for sure.

I think it's rather normal that this happens for new players in the space game or for tests of new systems like you see with Space X again and again. I would expect more that it will fail as that it will work the first few tries.

The US also had its share of rocket explosions before they got it right. Australia should keep trying and they get it right.