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A robot controlled SpaceX rocket has exploded after a crash-landing minutes after launch.

Nobody was onboard and no one has been hurt.

Test flights of the rocket named Starship had been delayed several times over the last week, and most recently a launch was called off on Tuesday.

However, the rocket's eventual launch from SpaceX's facility in Boca Chica, Texas was successful... The landing, not so much.

Codenamed SN8, it was the ship's first attempt at a high altitude flight test.

For about five minutes, the 50m-tall shiny chrome rocket flew over the Gulf of Mexico before turning sideways travelling back towards the Earth near to the US border with Mexico.

As Starship touched down, the self-guided rocket blew up, with hardly anything left from the craft following the explosion.

Space X's owner Elon Musk - who wants the rocket to carry people to Mars in as little as six years - had warned that the test flight might go wrong with a one-in-three chance of complete success.

The cause of the explosion was due to low pressure in the fuel tank which Elon Musk said caused "touchdown velocity to be high" meaning Starship's landing was too fast.

But the billionaire praised the test flight, adding that his team now has "all the data we needed".

"Mars, here we come!!" he said in a tweet.

The plan had been to test out some manoeuvres and ways the rocket would fly when re-entering Earth's atmosphere exiting space sideways or in a 'belly-first' position.

Just before landing the rocket then flips back up to its normal vertical position before touching-down.

During the test flight most of this was successful: the launch was fine followed by a steady climb into the sky, before heading back to the ground while in a sideways position. It was when the Starship tried to flip back vertically that things went wrong with the landing.

The new rocket was given three of SpaceX's latest 'Raptor' engines, a nose cone and something called 'aerodynamic control surfaces' - basically the big flaps at the top and bottom of the spaceship that control its direction.

For future missions the Starship will eventually launch sitting on top of a massive booster rocket called the Super Heavy.

That will feature roughly 28 Raptor engines, producing more than 70 meganewtons of thrust. To explain, that's far more powerful that the Saturn 5 rocket that took men to the Moon in 1969.

Both parts of the new SpaceX system - Starship and Super Heavy booster - will stand 118m tall on the launch pad. Which is taller than the bell tower of Big Ben in London.

In June this year, Mr Musk stated that Starship was now his number-one priority, now that SpaceX's Falcon rockets routinely fly satellites and Nasa astronauts into space.

It's planned that the technology will be used for future Moon missions and eventually Mars with Nasa viewing commercial companies such as SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, as a a cheaper way of getting people into space.