EL PASO, Texas (AP) – The first rocket launched from a commercial spaceport in New Mexico has been found, officials with the Connecticut company behind the launch announced Saturday.

The 20-foot SpaceLoft XL rocket was found nearly a week after it wobbled and went off course seconds after take off from Spaceport America in Upham, N.M., on Monday afternoon.

The unmanned rocket crashed in the rugged Southern New Mexico desert after reaching about 40,000 feet, well short of UP Aerospace’s goal of sending the rocket into suborbital space, about 70 miles above the earth.

Eric Knight, the company’s CEO, said Saturday that radar data from nearby White Sands Missile Range, the intended landing site, helped searchers find the remains of the rocket.

Exactly what caused Monday’s crash remained a mystery Saturday, Knight said.

“Now that we have the rocket we can start doing our anomaly investigation,” Knight said.

A crew from the Farmington, Conn., company, including Knight, had been searching the desert by air and on foot for the rocket for that last several days.

Thick vegetation from heavy monsoon rains in the area made the search all the more difficult, Knight said.

“It was very difficult terrain,” Knight said in a phone interview from the company’s headquarters.

At one point earlier in the week, Knight said, the search team was within about a 100 feet of the rocket but it was hidden by the thick desert brush.

Knight said it was unclear Saturday exactly how the rocket’s remains, the condition of which he did not describe, would be removed from the desert.

“They literally had to walk in and now we are tying to arrange the proper tools for the recovery, and that might include a helicopter,” Knight said. “We want to do it right. Now that we found it, now the recovery is going to take a few days.”

Knight said plans for the company’s second launch Oct. 21, during the annual X Prize competition in nearby Las Cruces, N.M., have not been canceled.

Despite not reaching space, Knight has said that Monday’s launch was a success because it was the first launch at the state-funded Spaceport America, currently a temporary concrete launch pad with a series of small temporary buildings in the desert, about 95 miles north of El Paso.

The site is also the proposed home of a $225 million spaceport where Richard Branson, the British billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, has announced plans to headquarter a space tourism company.