Putting a rocket into orbit is hard.

Japan’s private space startup Interstellar Technologies learned that Saturday when its crowdfunded sounding rocket called the Momo F-5 launched from Hokkaido.

The company raised, according to Space-dot-com, 42 million Yen (about US$391,000) on the Japanese crowdfunding site Campfire, to build and launch the rocket.

It’s launch record testifies to the difficulty of space technology, with only one of five rockets not ending in failure. The Momo-5 reached an altitude of about 7 miles, short of the space boundary of 62 miles, before an anomaly was determined by the ground crew that then aborted the flight 70 seconds after liftoff over the Pacific ocean.

Two other private space companies were also active over the weekend with Rocket Lab putting 5 satellites into orbit from New Zealand and SpaceX using its Falcon-9 booster putting fleet of earth-imaging Starlink satellites into orbit.

https://www.space.com/interstellar-technologies-momo-f5-rocket-launch-failure.html

Source: https://jeffkoeppel.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/crowdfunded-rocket-explodes-over-pacific/