SpaceX Accident Cost it Hundreds of Millions (fortune.com)

Elon Musk's SpaceX lost more than a quarter of a billion dollars in 2015 after a botched cargo run to the International Space Station and the subsequent grounding of its Falcon 9 rocket fleet, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. From a report: The accident derailed SpaceX's expectations of $1.8 billion in launch revenue in 2016, an analysis of the privately held firm's financial documents showed, according to the Journal, which said it had obtained the documents. SpaceX declined to comment on the Journal's report. In a statement emailed to Reuters, SpaceX chief financial officer Bret Johnsen said the company "is in a financially strong position" with more than $1 billion in cash reserves and no debt.

Comments

"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt"

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks government subsidies! Billions of free money, yay!

Re: "$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt"

[LaszloKerekes]

Even better!! Actually Google finances spaceX

Re: "$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt"

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is financing a Mexican space agency. There is a lot of early opportunity, send us 20 bucks.

Re:"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt"

[thinkwaitfast]

Why is this any different than the "Billions of free money" IBM gets from government subsidies?

Re:"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt"

[Anonymous Coward]

SpaceX is the cheapest launch provider.

Right wing assholes hate Elon Musk because he is saving the earth from the climate change they don't believe in.

Right wing assholes hate America, and they hate our planet.

Down with Putin. Down with Trump.

Re:"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt"

[Anonymous Coward]

SpaceX is the cheapest launch provider because they cur every corner to produce a death trap with the worst reliability record in the history of rocketry.

Fixed that for you.

Re:"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt"

[Anonymous Coward]

Tory Bruno, is that you?

Re:"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt"

[Anonymous Coward]

nope, just another russian troll repping for ULA because they are the largest user of russian rocket engines

At least they are getting better at impersonating 'Mericans

Re:"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt"

[Anonymous Coward]

SpaceX just launched satellites and landed the first stage of the rocket on a drone ship.

Can your Russian masters do that?

Re:"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt"

[K. S. Kyosuke]

with the worst reliability record in the history as remembered by my feeble brain's false memory.

Fixed that for you.

Re:"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt"

[Coren22]

In what world is a contract to provide services the same as free money? At that, this is a contract to provide servers in a "cloud", not the cheapest thing around to do properly.

No Gut no Glory

[Dorianny]

The danger of huge losses due to the inherent risk of explosions is what's kept rocket technology squarely in the hands of government programs for most of its development. At the time when NASA seems to have lost its way, thank you SpaceX and BlueOrigin for having the guts to move the technology forward despite the enormous risks

Re:No Gut no Glory

[Anonymous Coward]

Dafuk? NASA is doing cool shit like sending probes to Pluto, while SpaceX is a logistics company that hauls shit into orbit for the people doing real science (and no, Musk is never going to fucking Mars - not unless Trump wakes up one day and decides to cut him a $50 billion check.) If NASA has "lost its way" it's only because it doesn't get enough money to do everything it wants to do.

Cutting costs on getting things into orbit is nice and helps everyone out, but let's not pretend SpaceX is anything more than UPS in space.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[ScentCone]

You forgot about Orbital ATK.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[Anonymous Coward]

No shortage of Elon Musk ass-kissers on Slashdot. No thank you.

Re: No Gut no Glory

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. I'm betting if you took over, your elite trolling skills would land us on Alpha Centauri in no time

Re: No Gut no Glory

[Anonymous Coward]

Both are doing amazing things.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[Rei]

It's a somewhat problematic business model.

If they $250M per failure and have a failure 5% of the time on a $62M rocket then the per-rocket cost is $12,5M, or 20% of the rocket's value.

Now they're trying for two things: a big scaleup, and greater safety. So let's say that they get the accident rate down to 2%, and they 10x their value. The cost of a failure should scale proportionally to the size of their market because it means a standstill in launches, the same reputation hit, etc. So now it's a $2,5B failure, occurring 2% of the time, or $50M per launch on a $62M rocket, aka 81% of the rocket's value.

Their business model and scaleup plans appear to be built on a premise of extreme reliability. Whether they can ever actually get that, I don't know. I like to hope so; airplanes have done it, and I know they're thinking, "if we launch enough, like them, we'll have gotten all of the potential kinks out". And there's probably some truth to that. But can they scale reliability at the rate they want to scale their launch rate? I have my doubts, and if so, their expansion plans (and thus business model in general) is erroneous.

A particular aspect that concerns me about them getting failure rates down into the lower tenths of a percent is their use of unlined COPVs. I don't trust them. I don't have some massive level of confidence that simply toying around with their pressurization regimen and getting better at void prevention is going to provide some sort of permanent fix; LOX and composites just plain don't play nice together. Their solution is like (to be hyperbolic here) having a nitroglycerine-fuelled rocket and losing one because during pressurization the tank buckled, and the buckling set off the nitroglycerine, and then announcing that you've got a solution and the tank shouldn't buckle anymore. Well, that's great, return to flight and all, but at the end of the day, you still have a nitroglycerine-fuelled rocket.

I'd feel a lot more comfortable about their business model if they announced plans to switch to lined COPVs, and take the (several dozen?) kilogram mass penalty. But as I always say, I would love to be proven wrong on this!

Re: No Gut no Glory

[Anonymous Coward]

No shortage of basement-dwelling failures either

Re:No Gut no Glory

[nojayuk]

SpaceX isn't doing the rocket business the way other rocket builders do. That's a plus and also a minus on their part.

In this case they tried something new, supercooling the fuel and oxidiser to improve launch performance. Older fuddy-duddy rocket builders, if they decided to try this sort of thing would spend a couple of years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying the concept out, building prototypes, testing them to destruction and analysing the parts microscopically to see what happened to them. SpaceX did the equivalent of compiling the code and running a few unit tests and when nothing broke they beta-tested it with a paying customer's payload on top. Oops.

A previous launch failure was due to a third-party strut failing under load -- again SpaceX cut corners by not testing each and every component, accepting the risk of a failure rather than spending time and money on eliminating a one in a million possibility. This is something the older rocket builders do as a matter of course with the customer paying for it in the launch pricetag.

They're learning their lessons but it's costing them money, time and more importantly reputation. More rigorous testing will push the price of launches up and that eats into their low-cost launch niche while other contenders with proven track records of not cutting corners are pushing down into that market bracket (ISRO for one).

Re:No Gut no Glory

[Kjella]

A previous launch failure was due to a third-party strut failing under load -- again SpaceX cut corners by not testing each and every component, accepting the risk of a failure rather than spending time and money on eliminating a one in a million possibility.

They had a contract with a third party to supply parts built to certain specifications, they were supposed to do the testing. I really doubt they had any acceptable failure rate in that contract, like you might have with consumer toys. SpaceX had to backtrack and say "if you want it done right, do it yourself" but it's really contrary to what they want because that's the way you end up with massive vertically integrated behemoths and NASA-certified screwdrivers that costs 100x what a normal screwdriver costs.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[burtosis]

SpaceX isn't doing the rocket business the way other rocket builders do... SpaceX cut corners by not testing each and every component, accepting the risk of a failure rather than spending time and money on eliminating a one in a million possibility. This is something the older rocket builders do as a matter of course with the customer paying for it in the launch pricetag.

This becomes a problem as the number of components approaches a million.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[DerekLyons]

A particular aspect that concerns me about them getting failure rates down into the lower tenths of a percent is their use of unlined COPVs.

The thing is... Even by the rather loose standards of the launch industry, that's not extreme reliability. It's only a modest improvement over the Other Guys. (And not worth very much unless they can also correct their ongoing inability to maintain schedule.)

And the 'lower tenths' are nowhere near airplane like reliability - which is down in the lower millionth of a percent.

And on top of that - they don't use unlined COPV's. There's not even such a thing as an unlined COPV NAICT.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[hey!]

Wealth has its privileges.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[Rei]

It most certainly would be extreme reliability by the standards of the launch industry. The only ones that have better reliability than that that don't have nearly a statistically significant enough number of launches under their belt to assert that. Aka, "they haven't had a failure yet but nowhere near the several hundred launches required to assert a lower fraction of a percent or better failure rate".

We're not talking about airplane reliability here, we're talking about economics (the title of the article is "SpaceX Accident Cost it Hundreds of Millions"). Airplane-like reliability is for the future. We're living in the present.

All COPVs use an inner liner. The problem with SpaceX's COPVs is that they have no outer liner to separate the carbon fibre from the LOX. Outer liners are optional. SpaceX didn't use one. They lost a rocket because of it. They're going to keep trying doing without one. I really hope it doesn't cost them another. CF and LOX aren't fast friends.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[Rei]

To be clear:

  * Getting the failure rate down in the lower tenths of a percent or better is what they need to be able to ~10x their launch rate and still be economically viable, since a pad explosion will leave them stuck for just as long and scare off just as high a percentage of their customers whether they're launching 12 a year or 120.
  * SpaceX wants to have reliability like airplanes, and has talked about this frequently.
  * What they want to achieve, and what they need to achieve, are not the same thing. They do not need to achieve airplane-like reliability for the Falcon 9 to be viable.
  * That said, if they ever want to achieve their ultimate IPT plans, they absolutely will need airplane-like reliability. Because they're calling for ~1000 launches per booster on that thing with a turnaround cost of ~200k. They really cannot have anything go wrong with it.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[hey!]

This is kind of an oversimplified view of affairs as they now stand.

The newer players aren't competitors to NASA; they're competitors to NASA's traditional vendors. They probably wouldn't exist were it not for government policy to encourage and support more independent, entrepreneurial approaches to launch system development and management.

Re: No Gut no Glory

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah blah balh i dont like their business model because rockets can explode blah blah blah

Re:No Gut no Glory

[rasmusbr]

I doubt the tanks will be the root cause of any future payload losses now that they have identified them as a vulnerability. They probably have a vastly better understanding of the envelope of that system now.

SpaceX has basically said that the voids are fine as long as the oxygen does not freeze. If that is true then the "nitroglycerine" in your analogy would be the incredibly low temperatures combined with the fast loading times that they were using. (They were obviously loading helium that was cold enough to freeze oxygen... Yeah. Seriously.)

Now that SpaceX has the most economical launcher on the market I think their strategy is going to change from "launch often - fail quickly", to something like "test often - fail quickly on the testbench". Now that they have a rocket that can do work and make money, a rocket that was funded partly with tax money to carry people for NASA, their focus will naturally shift towards making it more reliable.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, like socialism. Both Musk's companies were saved by Uncle Sam.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[im_thatoneguy]

I think once you reach 98%+ reliability the most expensive part of the failure: grounding the fleet, no longer occurs. Once the Falcon 9 design stabilizes this year if they lose one after 50 successful launches they'll probably take a few weeks off but not months on end. There was even a substantially shorter down-time in 2016 with the most recent failure than in 2015.

And the other thing they have going for them now is re-usability and re-use. That could hypothetically result in new failure modes but it also should catch any obvious manufacturing flaws. Rapid re-use also means loads of more data and experience. If they can prove that their design is 98% reliable it just becomes "Welp, insurance will cover that. Sorry about the inconvenience."

Re:No Gut no Glory

[dallaylaen]

The cost of a failure should scale proportionally to the size of their market because it means a standstill in launches, the same reputation hit, etc

Scaling up means having multiple launchpads, so a disaster would slow down the launch pipeline rather than halt it completely. Also scaling up means getting their insurance right, so that a lost rocket "only" costs as much as the rocket itself. Still no fun to lose, but unlikely $2.5B, and maybe not even this time's $250M.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[K. S. Kyosuke]

NASA is doing cool shit like sending probes to Pluto, while SpaceX is a logistics company that hauls shit into orbit for the people doing real science

This is highly ironic (and/or indicative of your bias), since this "cool shit" was done by ULA, not by NASA. Yes, the ULA that is the same kind of logistics company as SpaceX, hauling shit into orbit for the people doing real science.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I'm not quite sure it's as simple as you're trying to portray it. They're definitely doing a lot of tests and aren't cutting any corners excessively. But some of the things they're trying are just so new that unexpected failure modes are bound to appear. They're most likely just willing to accept some risks when iterating the design as long as it seems that whatever you test beyond reason for a lot of extra money might be replaced a reasonably short period of time.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[nojayuk]

But some of the things they're trying are just so new that unexpected failure modes are bound to appear.

It would have been better for them if detecting the unexpected failure mode of supercooled LOX penetration of the carbon fibre windings on the helium bottle had been done on the ground in a test rig rather than in a complete stack on the launch pad. That's what testing in aerospace is meant to do and part of the reason launches are so expensive.

SpaceX is now required by launch customers to carry out hotfire tests without the payload being integrated -- this means the launch vehicle has to be rolled out to the pad, hotfired then returned to an integration facility, have the payload installed and then the completed stack rolled out to the pad again. This adds extra costs in time and money to a launch. It may be that in the future, after racking up a number of trouble-free launches their customers will opt for the cheaper option of integration/rollout/hotfire/launch but for now the cost of the extended procedure is going to have to be eaten, probably by SpaceX. Thorough testing might have been cheaper in the long run.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[pixelpusher220]

Agile vs waterfall.

Musk is moving fast, failing quickly and then obviously moving fast again.

If you try to plan absolutely every thing you'll move far far more slowly.

Also, see how fast we got to the moon vs being limited to LEO for 40 years.

Re: No Gut no Glory

[billdale]

You, sir, are either delusional or blind to any information that is not fake-newsed to you by Hannity, the Tea Party and anyone else determined to bloat space budgets for their own financial gain. Here is the bottom line, jackass: in the half-century since a dozen countries have been launching people and payloads into space, they have been spending ~$60 million at least on first stage rocket engines that burned up on falling back to Earth. That was where expense lists BEGAN... SpaceX was the first company (or any entity, such as a country or consortium) to launch multiple satellites into orbit, reverse the attitude of the booster, fire a second time back toward the launch pad, reverse attitude a second time, firing a third time to reduce reentry velocity, and land that twenty-story tall rocket butt-first on a barge rocking about at sea. The first time they did that, they launched 11 satellites into orbit; the rocket was reusable but was instead retained as a historical artifact for display. SpaceX has done this seven times so far, saving nearly half a billion dollars in launch expenses. The fuel at launch costs about $200,000, the main cost of each launch. That means each time they recover the booster and reuse it, cuts launch expenses by more than 99.5% Malign Musk and SpaceX all you want, all you are doing is showing what a miserable basement-dwelling troll you are. Thank you, Elon, ever so much for making space accessible now as it never has been before.

Re:No Gut no Glory

[Anonymous Coward]

SpaceX successfull launch record is best to date.

Ooops, there goes your whole argument.

As for the 3rd party parts: They moved to build everything in house after that to make sure that doesn't happen anymore.

As for the fuel stuff: Uhmm, that's how you normally do things. Not even NASA can afford to blow up 400M $ (ULA price) vehicle just to study if a single change, with worked perfectly and flawlessly on testing, might cause some issues. Maybe in the heyday in the 60s but not today.
I don't even know if your claim is even true about the test to use supercooled fuel.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, spaceflight is expensive. Incredibly expensive. It costs a hell of a lot of money to assemble spacecraft, and if you're not making any money in that time you must necessarily be losing it.

Re:So what?

[thinkwaitfast]

Not as expensive as building something like B737...but we build a couple of those a day.

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

They deserve it for designing a sub standard rocket.

I hope Elon gets killed by one of his rockets or self crashing cars.

Re: Good

[billdale]

What idiocy. There is nothing one can do with a rocket that will not involve significant risk; that is the nature of the business. Musk is taking a different and successful path that allows them to recoup more than 99.5% of launch cost by reusing the booster through very clever and innovative design and engineering. It has been a half-century of space launch, which has brought us to a point where Musk has given us a way to launch at a, massively lower cost. Those savings can be used to make those launches safer and safer as they gain experience. Considering that SpaceX has yet to lose a single life in their endeavors tells us more about your wish that he would die, than anything about him. You have an exceedingly dark and crusty soul. Tesla, BTW, has already likely saved dozens of lives by its autonomous design. More than a billion miles of their autopilot cars has shown that when drivers are on autopilot, crashes and mortality are reduced by half... Teslas are the safest vehicles on the planet and continue to get safer and safer. If they WERE not saving lives, they would not even be allowed to be on our roads.

fp! fp! fp!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've fulfilled my greatest lifelong goal by getting first post on a Slashdot story! FP! Yay! I win! You can all bow before my superior first posting skills! FP! FP! FP!

This FP is dedicated to my favorite TV show, Star Trek: Voyager!

FP! FP! FP!

LOL! I'm so much faster and better than all of you! LOL!

fp! fp! fp!

Elon could have chosen golf as hobby

[NotInHere]

But no, he chose rockets. A bit more expensive here to make mistakes.

Re:Elon could have chosen golf as hobby

[Dutch Gun]

And no Mulligans on your first stage.

Re:Elon could have chosen golf as hobby

[Anonymous Coward]

And no Mulligans on your first stage.

SpaceX is working on that too. As long as it doesn't land in the rough.

Well yeah

[phorm]

Usually having your expensive equipment explode massively will have a fairly severe financial impact. I'd hope that this sort of thing is something they'd planned for, given the risks in this industry. Even small mistakes = big consequences, and there's a lot of room for unknowns.

Hyperloop....

[roman_mir]

That's nothing. Just you wait until they try to build the Hyperloop and that thing has a structural problem....... BOOM, all the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars and everybody inside it and the company that built it - gone.

no sh*t!

[Anonymous Coward]

They had a rocket blow up on the launch pad, so not only did they lose their rocket, fuel, etc, but they failed to deliver a satellite.

I'm only surprised that it's that little, but absolutely not suprised that this cost them money.

I wonder if someone from ULA took a WSJ writer to lunch last week.

Re:no sh*t!

[Rei]

Propellant costs essentially nothing compared to the cost of the rocket.

Re:no sh*t!

[Rei]

And more to the point, in this case, the cost of the rocket costs little compared to the cost of all of the lost business, delays and pad repairs.

Rockets are still at risk of exploding...

[Gravis Zero]

... but less so than Samsung's Note 7. ;)

Me too

[Anonymous Coward]

I also lost $1.8 billion in launch revenue in 2016 by not being able to launch.

NASA could do a better job, if Congress allows it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to have to defend NASA, and old space here. They could be more competitive on price, if they were given the money, and told to be.

The expensive US space launch vehicles are MILITARY space launch vehicles. Congress, look at John McCain for example, wants the military to be able to put military satellites into orbit, in the event of a war with Russia, or China. Military satellites, tend to be very expensive. Therefore, you want a very expensive, reliable rocket. Very reliable rockets tend to be expensive. For the money spent on the EELVs, there have been 80! consecutive successful launches. A very good track record! Almost good enough for astronauts. Oh yes, a NASA probe might end up costing over $1 billion to develop. Significantly more than the $200 million rocket it goes up on.

Hell, in the late 90s, NASA proposed making cheap rockets, which would blow up 1/4 of the time. Congress didn't fund it. There was a program to design a cheap rocket engine called Fastrac. It would require less human labor, and be cheaper to manufacture. The project got cancelled with the x-34.

The SpaceX market is cheap satellites, and cheap cargo to the ISS.

How Orbital ATK could have done it

[Anonymous Coward]

Orbital Sciences could have gradually turned the Antares into a cheap, American made rocket, gradually substituting Soviet Parts, with American ones.

Why is this news?

[rsmith]

Their rocket blew up, they've been trying to find out why.
(Not uncommon in that business)

Is anybody surprised that this costs a lot of money?

Re:Why is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot isn't doing news anymore.

Re:Why is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually pretty clever news. Reuters boss told junior writer to publish an article with the words "SpaceX Accident" one day before SpaceX resumes launches, so that if there's another accident, then computerized news aggregators will get confused and think that Reuters broke the story.

Could be cheaper, given more money

[raymorris]

Your post may make sense, I don't follow the space program(s) close enough to know. I got chuckle from this though:

> They could be more competitive on price, if they were given the money

I suppose if taxpayers gave them a trillion dollars, they could charge customers $100. That doesn't make them cheaper - that just changes who is paying the bill.

Re:Could be cheaper, given more money

[Mr D from 63]

Your post may make sense, I don't follow the space program(s) close enough to know. I got chuckle from this though:

> They could be more competitive on price, if they were given the money

I suppose if taxpayers gave them a trillion dollars, they could charge customers $100. That doesn't make them cheaper - that just changes who is paying the bill.

I think you missed his point, which was that NASA was not given the money to pursue low cost but less reliable launch programs. They have to use appropriations for defined programs, their discretionary spending is quite small.

Only this guy is surprised

[raymorris]

> Is anybody surprised that this costs a lot of money?

Just this guy:

https://apple.slashdot.org/com...

Cost for one Falcon 9 flight = Build a 737

[raymorris]

Interesting, the cost to buy a brand new 737 is just about equal to the cost of launching the Falconl 9 once.

May have a point, I just got a chuckle

[raymorris]

I think I understand his point and as I said, he may be right. I just got a chuckle from the first sentence, before reading on. Kind of like when an old lady who talks real slow asks you "Do ...
you ...
like ...
cock ...
atiels
?"

Or when someone starts out with "NASA was not given the money to pursue low cost", before continuing to say something that makes sense.

And the point is?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around why this "article" (more like a blurb) exists. We've know pretty much since it happened that this was roughly the cost of the launch failure (~$200M satellite, ~$60M lauch vehicle). In fact I'm sure their losses are a bit higher (lost revenue from delays, investigation costs, etc). But that will be chump change in comparison to what SpaceX will rake in if they can improve their reliability a bit and even less than that if they can begin to reliably reuse first stages. The launch costs are so out of hand (especially in the US) some customers could literally afford to build two satellites and pay for two SpaceX launch contracts and have one fail and STILL be even/on top in comparison to traditional US launch contractors ($200M sat + $62m LV * 2 = $524M vs $200m Sat + $350M LV = $550m). Even at Ariane 5/Russian launch costs the launch failure rate has to be pretty darn high (like one failure for every four launches) before the Falcon 9 begins to look bad. True the Falcon 9 isn't something for critical/extremely expensive satellites yet but they're only about 14 years old, in a market where most of the players have been around since the cold war. In that time they've managed to do things (massively cut launch costs, return first stage LVs, privately fund, etc) that everyone else either couldn't do or claimed was impossible.

Botched?

[severn2j]

"botch" verb - carry out (a task) badly or carelessly.

Seems a bit strong, this shit is hard to do. Sure it crashed, but its not like they are a bunch of cowboys.

Re:No Gut no Glory....Launch Escape System

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a Launch Escape System, like on manned missions, that would save the satellite.

Multifunctional Boost Protective Cover

[Anonymous Coward]

NASAs Langley Research Center has designed a
Multifunctional Boost Protective Cover (MBPC) for a Launch
Abort System (LAS). In the event of a crewed launch, the
innovation provides a redundant means of saving the crew,
and for an unmanned launch, it provides the means for
recovering a very expensive, sensitive, and/or dangerous
payload. In addition, costs are reduced by minimizing insurance
premiums and costly delays to fabricate new complex
satellite systems in the event of a failed launch. NASA is
seeking development partners and potential licensees.