From the Wall Street Journal:
Internal documents reveal
aerospace company has thin bottom line vulnerable to accidents, hopes
planned satellite-internet business will finance eventual Mars missions
One hundred and thirty nine seconds is all it took for an unmanned rocket to explode after blastoff and turn Elon Musk’s booming Space Exploration Technologies Corp. into a geyser of red ink.
That
June 2015 disaster, followed by months of launch delays, contributed to
a quarter-billion dollar annual loss and a 6% drop in revenue, after
two years of surging sales and small profits.
The numbers are revealed for the first time in internal financial
documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The reports and
interviews with former SpaceX employees depict robust growth in new
rocket-launch contracts and a thin bottom line that is vulnerable when
things go awry. They also show the company putting steep revenue
expectations on a nascent satellite-internet business it hopes will
eventually dwarf the rocket division and help finance its goal of manned
missions to Mars.
A second explosion during testing on the launchpad in September
grounded SpaceX again, adding to losses and causing a four-month delay.
Its next launch is planned for Saturday,
when it will seek to regain momentum in the face of depressed revenue,
jittery customers and a ballooning backlog of delayed missions.
SpaceX,
based in Hawthorne, Calif., transformed the aerospace industry with
innovative rocket features and Silicon Valley-style software design
principles mandated by Mr. Musk, its billionaire founder and chief
executive. The 15-year-old company became the first American firm in
years to compete for commercial launch contracts, and the first company
to launch and return a spacecraft from orbit.
SpaceX declined to
comment on details of its finances, but said it has a solid record of
success and strong customer relationships. “We have more than 70 future
launches on our manifest representing over $10 billion in contracts,”
said SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnson. “The company is in a
financially strong position and is well positioned for future growth,”
adding it has over $1 billion of cash and no debt.
The Journal
reviewed SpaceX’s financial results from 2011 through the end of 2015 as
well as forecasts through the next decade. As a private company, SpaceX
isn’t obligated to publicly disclose the figures, and the information
has never been widely shared....MUCH MORE
