To Boldly Go Where Only Fish Have Gone Before

It's going to take more than a transporter to get Scotty back:

More bad news for Elon Musk, the billionaire PayPal founder who wants to sell low-cost space delivery to NASA and whoever else is buying.

On Saturday his privately funded company, SpaceX, suffered its third failed launch in a row of the Falcon 1, a two-stage rocket for ferrying satellites into orbit.

The two stages of Falcon 1's liquid-fuel rocket are designed to separate in mid-flight to shed excess weight.

The rocket successfully blasted off from the Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific near midnight Eastern time Saturday. It was lost two minutes and 20 seconds into launch after the stages failed to separate.

Lost along with the rocket were three small satellites, one for the Department of Defense and two for NASA, including an experimental solar sail, NanoSail-D.

Gone too were the ashes of 208 people including James Doohan, better known as "Scotty" of Star Trek fame, who had paid to have their remains scattered in space.

Heard right before the rocket quit, in a Scottish brogue: “I canna push her any faster, Captain, she's gonna blow!