NASA took the decision to destroy an unmanned ATK ALV-X-1 experimental suborbital rocket 27 seconds after yesterday's launch, at an altitude of 11,000 to 12,000 feet, after the morning liftoff got compromised by a not yet identified anomaly.

It appears that just shortly after launch, the rocket began to fly from the established trajectory. The safety officer took the decision to terminate the flight as a result of the rocket exceeding the safety limits to the public. NASA said they believed the debris fell into the Atlantic Ocean, off the Virginia coast.

The suborbital rocket, developed by Salt Lake-based Alliant Techsystems, was scheduled to carry two NASA hypersonic experiment payloads. The launch took place from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

This launch was the only experimental flight of ATK’s developmental ALV-X1 rocket, which lifted off NASA’s Hypersonic Boundary Layer Transition, or HYBOLT, and Sub-Orbital Aerodynamic Re-entry Experiment, or SOAREX, payloads.

The mission of the HYBOLT Payload was to obtain high-speed flight data for fundamental boundary layer transition flow physics, while SOAREX was supposed to collect data for atmospheric re-entry technology.

The HYBOLT experiment would have been useful for the future designs of space shuttles, as well as better understand the challenges of a supersonic flight, a speed regime that is very hard to simulate and predict.

The cost of the two payloads has been estimated to $17 million, but of course NASA said they knew the risks of launching payloads on an experimental rockets. Details on the ongoing investigation are yet to be revealed.