This is what a 'rapid unscheduled disassembly' looks like

Private spaceflight company SpaceX has released new pictures of its Falcon 9 rocket attempting to land on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean before undergoing what its chief executive, Elon Musk, euphemistically referred to as “RUD” – that’s “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”.

In other words, it blew up.

The intention was to land the nearly empty first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on the ship (labelled, in suitably grand terms, the “autonomous spaceport drone ship” by the company). Typically, the first stage of rockets are single-use, splashing down into the ocean after they’ve burned out and experiencing damaging atmospheric burn on the way down. The Falcon 9 was instead intended to control its descent with left-over fuel and hydraulically operated fins – and it nearly did.

Unfortunately, according to Musk, the rocket used up too much of its hydraulic fluid, which meant it lost control just before hitting the deck of the drone ship. The results were explosive:

Musk revealed the pictures, rescued from the video cameras onboard the ship, in a conversation with videogame programmer John Carmack, currently the chief technical officer of VR company Oculus. It’s perhaps that that encouraged Musk to use an acronym, RUD, which might be unfamiliar to most rocket scientists, but significantly more recognisable to some gamers.

The term originated on forums for discussing the game Kerbal Space Program, a gruellingly difficult simulation which tasks players with building spaceships and getting them to orbit (and, eventually, landing on other celestial bodies). While it is somewhat easier than real spaceflight, the game still refuses to pull punches, and perhaps as a result, its fanbase has been forced to come up with a fair few euphemisms for “my rocket blew up”.

Musk revealed his love for Kerbal Space Program in a Q&A in Reddit, joking (or maybe not?) that SpaceX uses the game for testing its software.

Not to be out-done, one Kerbal fan went and built a working replica of the Falcon 9 in-game – and successfully landed the first stage:

• This article was amended on 12 March 2015. The Falcon 9 rocket was attempting to land on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico as originally stated. This has been corrected.