For rocket company SpaceX, 2016 was both the best of times and the worst of times. The company landed its orbital Falcon 9 rocket in April on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean—a captivating, unprecedented spectacle that promised a bright future for the trailblazing company.

But in September, during fueling for a pre-launch engine test, a problem with the fueling process led to an explosion of the rocket's second stage. The Falcon 9 launch vehicle and its satellite payload were destroyed, and the company's Florida-based launch facilities sustained major damage. This second loss of a Falcon 9 rocket and payload in 15 months raised questions about the viability of SpaceX's "fast" and lean" rocket business. It also prompted concerns about the company's profitability.

Yet all is far from lost for SpaceX. The company remains a disruptive force that has radically remade the global launch industry over the last five years, threatening major aerospace companies and government launch services from the USA to France to Russia. And with the possibility of a major bounce-back year in 2017, here are four ways SpaceX can come roaring back to the top.

1. Return to Flight (early January)

The Falcon 9 rocket represents the core of SpaceX's business interests, and to sustain the company the Falcon 9 must fly again soon, and then often. In the aftermath of September's explosion, SpaceX disclosed that it has about 70 missions on its launch manifest, worth in total more than $10 billion. But without a reliable rocket (both in reality and in terms of perception) SpaceX cannot collect any of those funds.

Following the September accident, SpaceX's primary US-based competitor, United Launch Alliance, hit back hard by creating a "Rocket Builder" website that emphasized the reliability of its Atlas V rocket for commercial launches. This represented a bold move for the Colorado-based rocket company that, according to at least one key official in early 2016, was heretofore unable to compete with SpaceX on launch costs.

SpaceX missed its target for a return-to-flight mission by the end of 2016, but the company appears on track to launch a cluster of Iridium NEXT satellites from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base in early January. There are also signs the company is preparing for a potential January launch of an EchoStar satellite from a different pad in Florida. Getting one, or especially two, rockets off the ground next month would send a signal to its competitors around the world that SpaceX is back and ready to fly.

2. Re-fly a first stage (early 2017)

Before the September accident SpaceX had set a goal of re-flying one of its already-flown boosters before the end of 2016. A company official told Ars that SpaceX now intends to accomplish this goal sometime in "early" 2017.

Everyone cheered when SpaceX dramatically landed three rockets on a boat in 2016, but the promise of reusable rockets won't be fulfilled until launch vehicles can be swiftly refurbished and launched again. After all, the space shuttle was almost fully reusable, but the cost of restoring a flown shuttle to flight-ready status tallied in the hundreds of millions of dollars and took many months even under the best of circumstances.

SpaceX has been circumspect about the condition of the rockets it has returned from space and has not detailed how much work is required to prepare a Falcon 9 first stage for a second flight. But the company has at least one customer for its reusable rockets and could go a long way toward proving the viability of this idea by flying one. Ultimately the company's future profitability and plans to colonize Mars rely heavily on reusable spaceflight, so getting a Falcon 9 off the ground for a second time is critical.

3. Fly the Falcon Heavy (early- to mid-2017)

We've been promised the Falcon Heavy rocket for years—so much so that it seems like the rocket may never fly. But the company continues to make progress on the heavy-lift vehicle, with reports of rocket tests at its McGregor facility in Texas and the completion of Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, where the Falcon Heavy will take flight. A company official told Ars that SpaceX plans the inaugural Falcon Heavy launch in "early- to mid-2017."

Consisting of three Falcon 9 cores, this rocket would immediately become the most powerful booster on the planet, with its capacity of 54 metric tons to low-Earth orbit essentially doubling the lift capability of any rocket in existence today. Its cost, nominally $90 million but likely a multiple of that, would also be a significant selling point. A proven Falcon Heavy rocket, for example, might force Congress to ask why NASA is developing the Space Launch System, with a 70-ton capacity and an operational cost of $2 billion or more per flight.

Such arguments are academic while the Falcon Heavy remains theoretical, however. Moreover, the ongoing delays are beginning to cost SpaceX business. In December Inmarsat announced that it was moving the launch of a large communications satellite from the SpaceX rocket to a European Ariane 5 rocket in mid-2017. Flying the Falcon Heavy in 2017 would send an emphatic statement that not only has SpaceX moved beyond its Falcon 9 accidents but that it has stepped into the future with a heavy-lift launch rocket—territory where only superpower governments have built before.

4. Commercial crew flight (November 2017)

Until now SpaceX has derived the majority of its revenues from NASA through its commercial cargo and crew programs. In fact, it is likely that the Falcon 9 rocket would not exist today but for NASA funding beginning a decade ago to develop the booster to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.

Now, with a new president and uncertain relations with Russia, what NASA needs more than ever is the independent, US-based capacity to deliver astronauts to the space station. However, since the agency signed contracts with Boeing and SpaceX to do this in 2014, both companies have faced delays due to technical challenges. Originally, NASA had hoped to start operational flight missions before the end of 2017, but that won't be happening.

The present development plan calls for each company to fly an uncrewed, "demonstration" mission, and then a 14-day crewed test flight, before finally beginning operational missions to the station. The latest "no earlier than" dates for the crewed test flights are August, 2018 (Boeing) and May, 2018 (SpaceX). Such launches would allow one or both companies to begin operational flights before the end of 2018, which is when NASA's agreement to procure seats from Russia aboard its Soyuz spacecraft expires. Further delays would force NASA to buy additional seats, which would not sit well with Congress after fully funding the commercial crew program this year.

We'll know whether SpaceX's target dates for commercial crew are realistic if it completes a test flight of its crew Dragon and Falcon 9 rocket this year, as this demonstration mission—and precursor to the crewed test flight—is slated for November.

And what about Mars?

Visions of the Red Planet drive SpaceX's founder Elon Musk, and the colonization of Mars remains the company's raison d'etre. Indeed, SpaceX made some progress toward that goal in 2016, including revealing plans to land a Red Dragon spacecraft in 2018 (or, much more likely, 2020 or beyond) and later providing details about the Interplanetary Transport System and ambitions for human Mars landings in the 2020s.

But the harsh reality is that without a viable business model, SpaceX will never have the funds to further develop the technologies needed for Mars—including reusable rockets, completing engineering on the Raptor engine, planning a propulsive landing on Mars, building composite tanks, and much, much more. Moreover, without a functional business model, neither NASA nor any other government agency is going to invest the tens of billions of dollars into SpaceX needed to make the Mars vision a reality.

So it all comes back to the company's core business, which revolves around the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. As ever, SpaceX has doubters. Time for Musk and his band of merry engineers to prove them wrong once again.