When did Elon Musk create SpaceX and how many launches has it had since the beginning?

Elon Musk is working to revolutionise transportation - both on Earth and in space. He owns over a fifth of electric car maker Tesla and is the founder of rocket company SpaceX.

Musk grew up in South Africa and immigrated to Canada at the age of 17. He came to America as a transfer student to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor's degree in economics and physics.

He moved to California in 1995 to go to Stanford University but instead decided to pursue a career in business, co-founding a web software company called Zip2. In 1999, the start-up was bought by tech company Compaq for $307m. The same year, Musk co-founded online bank X.com.

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In 2000, X.com merged with Confinity to form PayPal. Two years later, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5bn.

Musk then created SpaceX in 2002, becoming CEO and chief engineer. It is an aerospace manufacturer, based in Hawthorne California, set up with the aim of reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonisation of Mars.

The company has achieved several firsts since it was founded. In September 2008, it launched the first privately-funded fully liquid-fuelled rocket to reach orbit.

At the end of 2010, it was the first private company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft. Then, in May 2012, it became the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) with flight Dragon C2+.

Some more firsts followed for SpaceX - though its major milestone came in May 2020, when the company successfully launched two NASA astronauts into orbit on a Crew Dragon spacecraft - sending them to the ISS.

This was the first time a private company