One of the biggest risks to SpaceX's business is probably the perception that they cannot launch on time, that they have multi-year delays: they are not reliabl

One of the biggest risks to SpaceX's business is probably the perception that they cannot launch on time, that they have multi-year delays: they are not reliable in terms of launch date expectations. While SpaceX is getting better at this, they need to be able to show prospective customers that they will do everything possible to launch on time, or with the fewest delays. Otherwise, cheaper launches be damned, many customers might switch to a launch provider that will commit to a date. See this here for a series of graphs of how big their launch backlog has grown over the years: http://www.americaspace.com/?p=93456 http://www.americaspace.com/?p=93456 This means that launching customer payloads on fresh-built rockets is Priority #1, at least until confidence is fully restored, cadence is up, and backlog is down.