Enlarge / RFA's first stage during a four-engine test-firing in May. (credit: Rocket Factory Augsburg)

The first stage of Rocket Factory Augsburg's first orbital launcher was destroyed in a fireball during a test-firing Monday evening at a spaceport in Scotland, the company said.

The German launch startup aimed to send its first rocket into space later this year and appeared to be running ahead of several competitors in Europe's commercial launch industry that are also developing rockets to deploy small satellites in orbit.

Within the last few months, Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) delivered all three stages of its first rocket, named RFA One, to its launch site at SaxaVord Spaceport, located on Unst, one of the Shetland Islands and the northernmost inhabited island in the United Kingdom. The company is based in Augsburg, Germany.

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Police Scotland received thousands of complaints under the nation's new hate crimes law just in the first few days after it took effect. Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf told The Telegraph that "a tiny percentage" of the numerous complaints are "turning into actual investigations," but control room staff is running up overtime weeding through them. Yousaf, who backed the law, said that even if complaints start to dwindle in the future, it will take "weeks or months" and cost "hundreds of thousands of pounds" to work through the backlog.

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The Scottish Ambulance Service fired Christopher Gallacher, a duty manager at West Centre in Glasgow, after finding he had an on-duty emergency dispatcher pick him and his family up at the airport after a vacation. According to a disciplinary tribunal, this happened on an evening when there were a "high number of calls" and patients were waiting for "lengthy periods of time." The dispatcher was away from his post for 45 minutes. Gallacher said he had assumed the man would use his break to pick him up.

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