Watch: China rocket crashes after ‘accidental’ launch

A space rocket owned by a private Chinese company accidentally launched itself during a test on Sunday, before crash landing into a hillside.

Footage on social media shows the Tianlong-3 rocket falling back to Earth and exploding on the hill in central China’s Henan province.

The company responsible for the rocket, Tianbing Technology said in a statement that there was a “structural failure at the connection between the rocket body and the test bench”, causing the rocket to take off.

The onboard computer automatically shut down, the statement said, and the rocket “fell into a deep mountain 1.5km southwest of the test bench”.

It added that there were no casualties from the incident as people in the area had been evacuated.

The Tianlong-3 is Chinese designed and manufactured and was intended to be a reusable rocket.