SpaceX loses major contract as launch schedule slips to 2017

It has been just over three months since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launchpad, taking its Facebook satellite payload along with it. The rocket wasn’t even firing its engines at the time, which has made tracking down the cause of the anomaly much more challenging. SpaceX was originally hoping the resume launches by the end of 2016, but it’s looking now as if we won’t see the Falcon 9 return to service until 2017. SpaceX has just lost its first big contract to the delay, a launch for the British satellite company Inmarsat.

The Inmarsat S-band satellite was scheduled to go up on a Falcon 9 launched from Cape Canaveral early in 2017. However, SpaceX is currently looking at a backlog of 70 launches for various smaller customers as well as NASA. The value of those contracts is somewhere north of $10 billion. If more of them start cancelling to go with other launch partners, that could be trouble for SpaceX.

Inmarsat says that it will be sending its S-band satellite up with European space launch firm Arianespace. You may recognize the company from its eponymous Ariane 5 rocket, which has been used to launch a number of European Space Agency missions including the comet-intercepting Rosetta. The Ariane 5 rocket (below) has a superb launch history with no failures of any sort since 2002, including 89 total launches in its operational life. Inmarsat does plan to launch a different satellite with SpaceX around the middle of 2017, assuming there are no further delays. 

SpaceX has made great strides for space flight, but there have also been setbacks caused by its drive to incorporate new technologies. Whereas many launch vehicles build on past technologies, SpaceX opted to create most of its systems from scratch. That has allowed it to do some amazing things, like retrieve the first stage of a rocket by landing it on a floating barge. It’s massively ahead of the rest of the industry, at least in theory.

In practice, there have been problems. The most prominent was the loss of a NASA resupply mission headed for the International Space Station. The recent launchpad incident was less severe, but still troubling. The investigation is ongoing, but the company says it’s nearing the end of the process. The last word from SpaceX blamed variations in the pressure and temperature of the helium it was loading into the rocket’s tanks.

At present, SpaceX plans to resume normal operations in January 2017 with the launch of the Iridium-1 satellite from Vandenberg. Hopefully SpaceX has gotten all the kinks worked out.