SpaceX explosion won't slow private industry's exploration plans

The explosion of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is a setback, but the incident need not have a long-term effect on the pioneering commercial aerospace company, experts say.

SpaceX is continuing its investigation into why the rocket, which had been a bright spot in the privately funded space race, broke apart more than two minutes after liftoff Sunday at Cape Canaveral.

Before Sunday's failure, the Falcon 9 had flown 18 successful launches including seven flights to the International Space Station. The failed flight is the first of the SpaceX's planned trips to the ISS to be unsuccessful.

"One launch failure doesn't make or break a company," said Marco Caceres, a senior space analyst at the Teal Group, a Fairfax, Va., consulting firm. "It is a successful vehicle and I think everybody in industry knows that these launch failures happen occasionally. The key is that they not become a pattern."

SpaceX officials on Monday promised a quick investigation and said it's unknown what impact the incident could have on future launches, which include two more supply missions to the ISS. The company "will review every available piece of data to identify root cause, resolve it and return to flight," it said in a statement.

The initial focus on a buildup in tank pressure suggests "something relatively simple like a clogged fuel line," Caceres said.

With spaceflight, it's not a question of whether accidents will happen, but when, said Henry Hertzfeld, a research professor of space policy and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

"Space is not easy, it's risky. These are very complex machines," Hertzfeld said. "I think we can be confident that whatever the technical problem is here, once it's fixed, that that won't happen again. They will continue on and presumably have a good record."

What's troubling is that the SpaceX incident follows several other privately funded space failures, says Michael Robinson, director of technology investing at investment news service Money Morning. Those include a Russian mission to resupply the space station in April, the November 2014 crash of the Virgin Galactic spacecraft in the Mojave Desert that killed one of its two pilots and the explosion in October 2014 of an Orbital Sciences Corp. rocket.

Orbital Sciences, now known as Orbital ATK (OA), saw its stock fall about 16% after the Oct. 29, 2014, explosion of its Antares rocket shortly after liftoff, he says. But the company has seen its stock rally in the months since, he said.

Orbital ATK shares fell about 3% Monday to $73.69. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.4%.

SpaceX is a private company with a rich valuation, but its reputation can see a "similar kind of recovery," Robinson said.

The explosion also is a blow to Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, in the competition against Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose own space company Blue Origin has teamed with SpaceX competitor United Launch Alliance. Those firms aim to supply the ISS. Blue Origin, like Musk's SpaceX, has goals of human spaceflight.

Despite the recent failed launches, private companies represent the future of spaceflight, Caceres says. That's because, "I don't see where Congress is giving NASA the kind of money that it needs to be able to build and operate its own launch vehicle," he said.

Robinson likens the competition between corporations is similar to that of the initial U.S.-USSR space race. But he cautioned that "people forget that space is a dangerous business and these setbacks come along. The space shuttle had problems and we lost people twice there."

SpaceX, he predicted "will find out what occurred and (it) will fix the problem fairly quickly."