VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — A Falcon 9 rocket roared into the sky on Saturday carrying 10 communications satellites — a return by SpaceX and its billionaire leader, Elon Musk, to the business of launching satellites to orbit.
But financial details disclosed this past week about the company overshadowed the successful liftoff, raising questions about the viability of Mr. Musk’s long-range plans for SpaceX and his vision of sending people to Mars.
SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., has been set back since September, when a different Falcon 9 caught fire and exploded on a launchpad in Florida, destroying the rocket and its payload, a $200 million Israeli satellite that Facebook had planned to lease to expand global internet services. The company’s rockets had been grounded since then. An internal investigation concluded that a failure of a helium vessel in the second stage liquid oxygen tank had led to the conflagration.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial space launches, accepted SpaceX’s report on the explosion’s causes on Jan. 6 and issued a launch license, clearing the way for Saturday’s liftoff here, on the other side of the country. To prevent a recurrence, SpaceX adjusted its fueling procedures to avoid overcooling of the helium.
Saturday’s countdown proceeded smoothly, with the liftoff occurring within a one-second window that would send the rocket on a trajectory to line up with the orbit of a group of current Iridium Communications satellites. The new satellites are more powerful than the original ones, which have been in orbit nearly two decades and have outlived their designed lifetimes.
SpaceX also repeated its feat of recovering the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, landing it on a floating platform named “Just Read the Instructions” in the Pacific. Less than 90 minutes later, mission control received confirmation that all 10 satellites had been successfully deployed.
Over the next 14 months, the company plans six additional Falcon 9 launches to deploy 60 more Iridium satellites that will completely replace the constellation.
In the short-term, the successful launch helps put SpaceX back on track. The explosion and subsequent four-month grounding created a backlog of launches, including cargo missions for NASA to the International Space Station. September’s explosion was SpaceX’s second failure in 15 months; a Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA cargo disintegrated in flight in June 2015.
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX had lost $260 million in 2015 after the earlier accident, and revenue dropped 6 percent to $945 million. In earlier years, SpaceX officials including Mr. Musk described the company as consistently profitable; that claim has been removed from SpaceX’s website.
Company officials did not dispute the numbers reported in The Wall Street Journal article, but portrayed a rosy future.
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