On Sunday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket suffered a malfunction and exploded shortly after launch. That's unusual for the company. And as a result it's unlikely to cause it too many problems in the long term, according to Forecast International Aerospace analyst Bill Ostrove.
"The launch failure by itself is not much of an issue," Ostrove told me. "Most people in the industry understand that launching rockets into space is really difficult and occasional failures are just the price of conducting launches. Overall, SpaceX has a pretty strong record of success (about 95%) with the Falcon 9."
That said, Ostrove did note two areas of concern for the company. The first is that this failure marks the second commercial cargo failure in eight months, the first being from the failure of an Orbital-ATK Antares rocket last October. Ostrove says that those two failures could give ammo to opponents of NASA's commercial space programs. Since SpaceX derives a lot of revenue from contracts with NASA, there's some potential issues there.
The other major issue for SpaceX is that Falcon 9 flights will be delayed pending the investigation of the problem - and delays are an issue.
"Delays have been a bigger problem for SpaceX than reliability," Ostrove wrote today. "The company's low price continues to attract customers. However, it has been unable to keep up with demand."
Ostrove expanded on this to me: "Companies won't stay away from SpaceX for fear of further failures, but they might stay away because SpaceX already has a booked launch manifest. That goes for both commercial and government customers."
All that said, unless SpaceX suffers more losses, Ostrove believes that company's position is too strong for it to suffer too much in the long term. Its prices are competitive and they have a strong track record, he told me.
"Most satellite operators (both government and commercial) want to have options to launch satellites," he continued. "With ULA talking about eventually getting down to a single launch vehicle, the USAF will need SpaceX to maintain competition. Most large commercial operators like SES and Intelsat talk about launch competition as well. For that reason alone, SpaceX will continue to get contracts."
