SpaceX explosion puts goals of Facebook, Musk into question

By Kenneth Chang, Mike Isaac and Matt Richtel, New York Times News Service

Friday, Sept. 2, 2016 | 2 a.m.

A spectacular explosion of a SpaceX rocket on Thursday destroyed a $200 million communications satellite that would have extended Facebook’s reach across Africa, dealing a serious setback to Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs the rocket company.

The blast is likely to disrupt NASA’s cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, exposing the risks of the agency’s growing reliance on private companies like SpaceX to carry materials and, soon, astronauts.

The explosion, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, intensified questions about whether Musk is moving too quickly in his headlong investment in some of the biggest and most complex industries, not just space travel but carmakers and electric utilities.

This is not the first problem Musk has suffered as he tries to create space travel that is cheap and commonplace. Each of his companies, including Tesla and SolarCity, has hit major stumbling blocks recently. The owner of a Tesla car died in May in a crash using the company’s autopilot software, and SolarCity faces major financial challenges.

“SpaceX is running a punishing schedule,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a former NASA official.

“There is probably some human factor involved here. To what extent was human error part of this? And if so, why? Are you running your people too hard? What are your safety requirements?”

Pace said an internal investigation would have to look at the company’s operations as it tried to ramp up the pace of launches.

The company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, said in a statement, “Our No. 1 priority is to safely and reliably return to flight for our customers, and we will carefully investigate and address this issue.”

The Falcon 9 rocket burst into flames in a violent series of blasts starting at 9:07 a.m., spewing plumes of dark smoke around the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and sending vibrations felt by residents nearby.

The rocket had been set to launch on Saturday, carrying a satellite for Spacecom, an Israeli company.

The explosion was particularly painful news for Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who is touring Kenya, promoting a program reliant on the satellite, known as Amos-6, with entrepreneurs in the country. He had promised them connectivity.

Just hours after the news of the explosion broke, Zuckerberg expressed disappointment on his Facebook page “that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite,” a swipe at Musk and his team, who were still trying to figure out what went wrong.

Musk did not respond publicly to Zuckerberg. But he posted a brief explanation on Twitter: “Loss of Falcon vehicle today during propellant fill operation. Originated around upper stage oxygen tank. Cause still unknown. More soon.”

The Falcon 9, developed by SpaceX with NASA financing, had had previous problems. In June 2015, a rocket carrying NASA cargo to the International Space Station fell apart in-flight when a strut holding a helium bottle snapped, setting off a chain of events that destroyed the rocket moments later. This latest episode is likely to push back the timetable NASA had after hiring SpaceX and Boeing to carry astronauts to the space station by the end of next year.

NASA said it was too soon to say how the explosion would affect its space station operations, asserting that it remained “confident” in its commercial partners. “Today’s incident — while it was not a NASA launch — is a reminder that spaceflight is an incredible challenge, but our partners learn from each success and setback,” the agency said.

SpaceX’s next cargo mission to the space station is scheduled for November.

Coincidentally on Thursday, a report released by NASA’s inspector general, Paul K. Martin, said SpaceX and Boeing were likely to face additional delays in their launch schedules anyway.

Launches with crews will probably not lift off before the second half of 2018, three years later than planned, the inspector general said.

Changes that SpaceX is making to the design of the capsule, to allow landing in water instead of on land, are causing the latest delays, Martin said. In addition, NASA has been slow in examining safety reviews submitted by the companies, and as a result, late and costly redesigns might be needed, Martin said.

SpaceX lists about 40 launches of satellites and other cargo on its manifest for commercial companies, NASA and the U.S. Air Force.

Space industry experts say that Musk faces risks in balancing SpaceX’s backlog of contracts — spanning the next few years — without cutting corners to stay on the company’s busy schedule.

“Whenever you have a failure along these lines, you of course face delays, which inevitably sets back some of your commercial and government satellite contracts,” said Marco Cáceres, senior space analyst and director of space studies at The Teal Group, an aerospace research firm. “They have to fight the temptation to keep to a schedule, even if that means setting back their launches into next year.”

SpaceX had hoped for 18 rocket launches this year; so far, eight have occurred. Overall, SpaceX has had 27 successful launches of Falcon 9 rockets.

An episode like Thursday’s is rare. Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who tracks rocket history, said the last time such an explosion happened on a Cape Canaveral launchpad, before the ignition of engines for liftoff, was in 1959.

SpaceX is rebuilding a separate launchpad, one of the two formerly used for NASA’s space shuttle missions, for the astronaut launches. That launchpad is scheduled to be ready by the end of the year.

Business analysts were mixed on the effects of the explosion on Musk’s other investments at a time when he is under considerable financial pressure with the planned merger of Tesla and SolarCity.

Musk draws vocal admirers and detractors, some of whom are “short” investors betting that Tesla cannot execute on its business plan.

Trip Chowdry, a senior analyst at Global Equities Research who studies Tesla’s performance, described Musk’s situation as a “double-edged sword.”

“When things work out well, people believe Musk to be a superstar,” Chowdry said. But when things go wrong like an explosion at a separate company, Tesla investors tend to make more general inferences, too.

“When all is said and done, does it have any impact on Tesla stock? No,” he said. “But events at SpaceX do create headline risk for Tesla stockholders.”

The demise of the satellite, called Amos-6, puts a significant damper on Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, a grand plan spearheaded by Zuckerberg to provide wireless connectivity to nations across the world that do not otherwise have easy internet access.

In a partnership with Eutelsat, a French satellite provider, Facebook planned to use Amos-6 to offer internet coverage to large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Along with satellite coverage, Facebook is teaming with local internet providers to offer access, and is also building its own drones — the first of which is named Aquila — to beam internet connectivity down to cities.

Its Internet.org initiative had already sustained a setback when the company’s aggressive overtures were rejected by local regulators in India earlier this year.

On Thursday, Zuckerberg struck an upbeat tone in his post about the rocket failure, noting that the company has other strategies in the works to expand internet connectivity across the world. Aquila, the Facebook-built drone, he noted, recently undertook its first successful flight in the desert.

Still, the setback will delay Facebook’s ambitious plans and even more ambitious timetable.

Shortly after his SpaceX comments, Zuckerberg struck a cheerier note by posting some “good news” from the region: A family of baby giraffes was seen on his safari.