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

Posted by msmash on from the profitable-maybe dept.

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.

37 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Re: "$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt" by LaszloKerekes · · Score: 1

    Even better!! Actually Google finances spaceX

  2. No Gut no Glory by Dorianny · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:No Gut no Glory by ScentCone · · Score: 1

      You forgot about Orbital ATK.

      --
      Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
    2. Re:No Gut no Glory by Rei · · Score: 2

      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!

      --
      Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
    3. Re:No Gut no Glory by nojayuk · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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).

    4. Re:No Gut no Glory by Kjella · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    5. Re:No Gut no Glory by burtosis · · Score: 1

      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.

    6. Re:No Gut no Glory by DerekLyons · · Score: 1

      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.

    7. Re:No Gut no Glory by hey! · · Score: 1

      Wealth has its privileges.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    8. Re:No Gut no Glory by Rei · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
    9. Re:No Gut no Glory by Rei · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
    10. Re:No Gut no Glory by hey! · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    11. Re:No Gut no Glory by rasmusbr · · Score: 1

      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.

    12. Re:No Gut no Glory by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 1

      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."

    13. Re:No Gut no Glory by dallaylaen · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
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    14. Re:No Gut no Glory by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    15. Re:No Gut no Glory by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    16. Re:No Gut no Glory by nojayuk · · Score: 1

      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.

    17. Re:No Gut no Glory by pixelpusher220 · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people :-D
    18. Re: No Gut no Glory by billdale · · Score: 1

      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.

  3. Re:"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt" by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 2

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

  4. Elon could have chosen golf as hobby by NotInHere · · Score: 2

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

    1. Re:Elon could have chosen golf as hobby by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      And no Mulligans on your first stage.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    2. Re:Elon could have chosen golf as hobby by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And no Mulligans on your first stage.

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

  5. Well yeah by phorm · · Score: 1

    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.

  6. Rockets are still at risk of exploding... by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2

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

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  7. Re:So what? by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

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

  8. Re:no sh*t! by Rei · · Score: 1

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

    --
    Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
  9. Re:no sh*t! by Rei · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
  10. Why is this news? by rsmith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    --
    Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
  11. Could be cheaper, given more money by raymorris · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Could be cheaper, given more money by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

      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.

  12. Only this guy is surprised by raymorris · · Score: 1

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

    Just this guy:

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

  13. Cost for one Falcon 9 flight = Build a 737 by raymorris · · Score: 1

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

  14. Re:"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt" by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

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

    Fixed that for you.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  15. Botched? by severn2j · · Score: 1

    "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.

  16. Re:"$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt" by Coren22 · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
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