The United States grounded SpaceX's Starship and ordered Elon Musk's company to investigate why the spaceship spectacularly disintegrated.

SpaceX's Starship was destroyed during its seventh test flight on Thursday night, with the rocket breaking apart less than 10 minutes after blasting off

SpaceX launched Starship on Thursday for a seventh test flight, after weather concerns pushed back an experiment that will feature the spacecraft’s first payload deployment test, and while it successfully caught the Super Heavy Booster, Starship lost connection and “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's space company has blasted its first rocket into orbit in a bid to challenge the dominance of Elon Musk's SpaceX. The New Glenn rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 02:02 local time (07:02 GMT).

SpaceX sent up its first test flight of the year for its Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Texas, catching the booster for just the second time back at the launch site, but suffering a loss of the upper stage.

SpaceX launches giant rocket in latest test SpaceX attempts the seventh test flight of Starship from Boca Chica, Texas. NASA has reserved a pair of Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade.