If you have to fail while launching a rocket, you have to at least hope it goes in a fiery ball of fire that makes for a good show worth a few million dollars. Sadly, the people from Sea Launch didn’t even get that from their Zenit-3SL rocket, which failed to launch from a floating pad south of Hawaii.
It didn’t go boom. The first stage just shut down 40 seconds after ignition. The rocket splashed into the sea.
Sadly, this means that the team has also lost an Intelsat-27 satellite that was going to provide services to the Americas and Europe.