While Jeff Bezos has spent $14 billion to achieve his first space launch, his billionaire rival has built a thriving business, mostly with other people’s money.

SpaceX confirmed the upper stage had undergone "rapid unscheduled disassembly," the company's euphemism for an explosion.

"Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity."

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and officials from the Turks and Caicos Islands have launched probes into SpaceX's explosive Starship rocket test that sent debris streaking over the northern Caribbean and forced airlines to divert dozens of flights.

SpaceX launched its Starship mega-rocket for the seventh time. It achieve an epic booster catch but the ship was lost.

SpaceX pulled off its “chopsticks” catch of a Super Heavy rocket booster but lost the Starship spacecraft on Thursday during the vehicle’s seventh uncrewed test flight.

Flawed rocket launches by SpaceX and Blue Origin still leave both companies in position to dominate the space sector.

The Federal Aviation Administration is requiring Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to investigate what went wrong on their respective

While the Starship is lost, the mission's first-stage booster successfully returned to the launch tower, where it was caught by the tower's robotic arms.

Starship's previous six test flights occurred in April and November of 2023 and March, June, October and November of last year. SpaceX aimed to conduct a chopsticks catch of Super Heavy on Flight 6 as well, but a communication issue with the launch tower nixed that try, and the booster diverted for a Gulf of Mexico splashdown.

On Episode 144 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik take a look a pair of private moon missions by Firefly Aerospace and ispace that lifted off this week and so much more.