Eventually one of these private space companies will have a highly public, challenger-type disaster. I wonder if a startup like SpaceX could survive something like that.
Kind of depends on ratios apparently. Not to pick on Airbus but they have had planes drop out of the sky over the ocean, plow into the ground at an air show, and run out of gas mid flight. But they have survived. Most of their planes have worked fine.
If SpaceX has 500 successful launches and one blows up and kills everyone on board, it will be sad, but it wont kill them, it might not even hurt their stock if they couldn't have avoided it.
That is a long way of saying the answer is that they probably won't have an issue if they have done a good job on the engineering and find out quickly the root cause of the accident.
Airbus was some kind of convoluted giant joint venture between Europe's governments and largest aerospace concerns, with a Lot of national prestige (and defense connections) wrapped up in it so it was kind of too big to fail and not a very good example in this context.
I believe the Musk has stated that scenarios like this are one of the reasons that he plans to continue putting a portion of his personal fortune into the company, so it can ride out the (inevitable) hard times.
I think loss of a crew early in the program might indeed do a private space company in. Assuming the engineering of the launch abort system is any good, though, I think it's a lot more likely that the first "disaster" will be an incident where the launcher is destroyed but the crew survives. It's possible that a situation like that might actually increase the public's confidence in the company.
