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

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

[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).

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?