Back-to-back engine failures doomed a privately developed Australian rocket moments after liftoff Tuesday, cutting short a long-shot attempt to reach orbit with the country's first homegrown launch vehicle.

The 82-foot-tall (25-meter) Eris rocket ignited its four main engines and took off from its launch pad in northeastern Australia at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC) Tuesday. Liftoff occurred at 8:35 am local time Wednesday at Bowen Orbital Spaceport, the Eris rocket's launch site in the Australian state of Queensland.

But the rocket quickly lost power from two of its engines and stalled just above the launch pad before coming down in a nearby field. The crash sent a plume of smoke thousands of feet over the launch site, which sits on a remote stretch of coastline on Australia's northeastern frontier.

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iRocket is aiming to hit the public markets but the SPAC vehicle doesn't have much cash left.

An experimental reusable rocket developed by the research and development arm of Honda Motor Company flew to an altitude of nearly 900 feet Tuesday, then landed with pinpoint precision at the carmaker's test facility in northern Japan.

The accomplishment may not sound like much, but it's important to put it into perspective. Honda's hopper is the first prototype rocket outside of the United States and China to complete a flight of this kind, demonstrating vertical takeoff and vertical landing technology that could underpin the development of a reusable launch vehicle.

While Tuesday's announcement by Honda was unexpected, the company has talked about rockets before. In 2021, Honda officials revealed they had been working on a rocket engine for at least two years. At the time, officials said a small satellite launch vehicle was part of Honda's roadmap.

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In recent written testimony to a US House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees the military, the senior official responsible for purchasing launches for national security missions blistered one of the country's two primary rocket providers.

The remarks from Major General Stephen G. Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, concerned United Launch Alliance and its long-delayed development of the large Vulcan rocket.

"The ULA Vulcan program has performed unsatisfactorily this past year," Purdy said in written testimony during a May 14 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. This portion of his testimony did not come up during the hearing, and it has not been reported publicly to date.

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The payload fairing at the top of Gilmour Space's first Eris rocket was supposed to deploy a few minutes after lifting off from northeastern Australia. Instead, the nose cone fell off the rocket hours before it was supposed to leave the launch pad Thursday.

Gilmour, the Australian startup that developed the Eris rocket, announced the setback in a post to the company's social media accounts Thursday.

"During final launch preparations last night, an electrical fault triggered the system that opens the rocket’s nose cone (the payload fairing)," Gilmour posted on LinkedIn. "This happened before any fuel was loaded into the vehicle. Most importantly, no one was injured, and early checks show no damage to the rocket or the launch pad."

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