“The company lost $260 million in 2015 when one of its Falcon 9 rockets, carrying two tons of cargo to the international space station, exploded shortly after liftoff,” writers Rolfe Winkler and Andy Pasztor reported for The Journal.
The financial hit was so hard because of launch delays. SpaceX did an internal investigationand made changes to its rocket fleet and operations. It wouldn’t launch again until December 2015 — when it landed its first Falcon 9 booster on a launch pad — missing out on six of 12 planned launches.
A Falcon 9 launch costs third-parties about $62 million, which means SpaceX missed on its projected launch revenue by roughly $370 million.
