SpaceX Completes Its Seventh Successful Mission of 2018 With Launch of CRS-14 (youtube.com)

Longtime Slashdot reader lalleglad writes: SpaceX today launched a Falcon 9 with its 14th Resupply Services mission. I saw it went well, and I hope it will also attach to the International Space Station (ISS) in good order. Incidentally, it carries the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM), which is an European Space Agency (ESA) project to investigate Earth-to-space lighting and thunder. Let's hope that it will enable better weather movement understanding, and for us plain people, better weather forecasts! "The Falcon 9 rocket, whose first stage launched ISS supplies last August, fired nine Merlin main engines again to roar from Launch Complex 40 at 4:30 p.m.," reports Florida Today. "Ten minutes later, the unmanned Dragon capsule, which launched to the ISS two years earlier, floated free of the rocket's upper stage to start a two-day journey back to the orbiting research complex. It was the second time a recycled Falcon 9 and Dragon had launched together, and the 11th time in just over a year that SpaceX had re-launched a used -- or what the company prefers to call 'flight proven' -- rocket." CNBC notes that the CRS-14 launch was the company's seventh successful mission this year. You can watch the recorded livestream of the launch here.

Comments

Reliability..

[thesupraman]

So, SpaceX now seems to have 52 Falcon 9 launches, with one inflight failure (launch 19) (and one preflight testing failure).
The Space Shuttle had 135 launches, with one launch failure (and one return failure)

They are not doing too bad, for something not human-rated.

Re:Reliability..

[JoshuaZ]

Yes, but keep in mind that the shuttle's failure rate was well below the planned for failure rate by more than an order of magnitude. However, at the same time, it is worth noting that when the Falcon 9 does finally get human-rated, it will almost certainly be safer than the shuttle since the Dragon can easily abort at pretty much all points in its mission profile.

Re:Elon's little empire is going bankrupt

[Rei]

What financial statements? SpaceX is a privately held company. And it's on a roll.

You're thinking of Tesla. They already went bankwupt ;)

Seriously, there was literally no news with a long-term impact that affected this slide, apart from the Moody's statement, which was itself based on no news with a long-term impact. The plunge in price was due to a surge in short positions based on a bunch of short term bad news. And the liquidity arguments are absurd.

In broader terms, the bear argument is that Tesla is not going to be able to pay off 900-and-something million in bonds due in spring 2019. Not a typo: 2019. And if that sounds like a lot of money, remember that even in Q1, Tesla's gross profit (quarterly gross profit) was $2,2 billion dollars. Tesla is already producing twice as many vehicles per week as they averaged in 2017. Averaged over Q1? No, it was only the upgrades during recent Fremont downtime that pushed them up that high. But it's important to remember that that gain is just *one* quarter of production acceleration. Even if you want to pretend it's a burst rate (in which it's probably more like 2500/wk extrapolated in order to have the whole week average 2000/wk), and that the 2000/wk is really smoke and mirrors and sustained is really more like 1000-1500/wk, a quarter ago the sustained rate was ~250-450/wk with a burst rate of 1000/wk

Yes, there's also Tesla's SGA expenses which in Q4 were roughly equal to their gross profits, but those don't grow linearly with gross profits; SGA expenses have to scale up before production and sales, and there's no reason to expect SGA growth to anywhere near match gross profit growth. Even at present, SGA is roughly equal to gross profit; the losses were because of ~$1,4B in R&D, which A) can be cut at any time, and B) doesn't increase at all with production scaleup.

Tesla had $3,4B cash on hand as of Q4. Go ahead and subtract the ~200M due in November and call it $3,2B. Now remember what was previously written: after the Fremont downtime earlier this month now up to double the rate as in 2017. Does that mean double the revenue? No, it's even better than that, because they have operations costs and depreciation on their production hardware regardless of how many vehicles it turns out; this means that they simultaneously grow the margin as they scaleup.

This isn't going to dramatically alter Q1's figures, although the quarterly loss will be smaller than Q4's. But it's going to have a profound impact in Q2, and depending on the rate of growth during Q2, even more profound in Q3 and Q4.

Of course the bears live in another world where Tesla is actually secretly super broke and going "bankwupt" tomorrow and will never produce anything and blah blah blah. We know this. TTAC's Tesla Deathwatch is dead, so long live Seeking Alpha, right?