Nearly 10 months after one of its rockets exploded in a fireball over the Pacific Ocean, destroying a commercial satellite and damaging launch equipment, Sea Launch Co. now finds itself at a critical juncture.

The Long Beach-based venture, one of just a handful of commercial satellite launch companies in the world, plans to return to space this Wednesday with a launch that needs to go off without complications, given the stiffening competition in its industry.

“The first launch after a failure is very important,” said Marco Caceres, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group Corp. “There is a lot riding on it because you don’t want two consecutive failures. If you have two in a row, people start worrying.”

Sea Launch, a joint venture of Chicago-based Boeing Co. and Russian, Ukrainian and Norwegian companies, delivers commercial telecommunications satellites to orbit over the equator with its specialized Zenit-3SL rocket, which is manufactured by the partners. The company this week will launch a telecommunications satellite for a United Arab Emirates mobile phone company.

The failure last January tarnished an otherwise strong launch record. Since its first mission in 1999, the company has made more than 20 successful launches for customers, including El Segundo-based DirecTV Group Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Inc. Sea Launch did suffer one previous failure in 2000.

But the stakes have risen considerably over the past few years in the commercial satellite market. A growing number of launch companies including startups in India and China are seeking to pick off some of the limited number of launches. There were only 22 commercial launches worldwide over the past 12 months generating some $1.4 billion in revenue, according to Federal Aviation Administration.

With the rapid rise in cellular and other communications worldwide, it is expected the number of commercial satellites going into orbit over the next five years will roughly double. In order to remain a viable player in the growing industry, Sea Launch must convince its customers that the incident was nothing more than an anomaly.

“It certainly was a setback,” said Paula Korn, a spokeswoman for Sea Launch. “We have spent the last eight months in recovery mode.”

Equatorial launches

The company launches from a converted oil rig along the equator 3,000 miles from its Long Beach headquarters. Sea Launch touts the efficiency of its equatorial launch site, which provides a more direct route to a stationary orbit above the equator and allows the rocket to carry a greater payload.

Its competitors launch from land, including Arianespace, a French company that dominates the commercial satellite launch industry with more than 50 percent of the market. It has a Guiana launch site near the equator.

Sea Launch, which has about 50 full time employees, operates out of a 17-acre former Navy base. There, workers receive the satellites, where they are moved, along with the rocket, onto a specially designed, 660-foot-long ship for final assembly.

While still docked in Long Beach, the rocket is then transferred to the launch platform, a self-propelled former oil rig that is 436 feet long. The ship, platform and crew must travel more than a week to the launch site.

On Jan. 30, a Zenit rocket carrying the NSS-8 telecommunications satellite and about 500 tons of fuel exploded just seconds into the mission in a fiery blast that damaged the platform, which is unmanned during liftoff.

While no crew members were injured, the catastrophic explosion garnered attention across the globe when dramatic video of the incident made the rounds on the Internet. YouTube videos featuring the explosion have logged nearly a million views.

After a lengthy review, the company found that the cause of the explosion was a problem with one engine’s turbopump, which then set off a chain reaction. Sea Launch spent much of the past 10 months repairing its equipment and getting ready for the launch on Nov. 14.

Total damages were about $30 million, which were covered by insurance. However, Sea Launch also suffered financially from losing scheduled launches to competitors. (The company charges $80 million for a typical launch, but Sea Launch does not disclose its net profit from the launches.)

The company had six launches scheduled in 2007 prior to the incident, but several customers have found other launch providers for this year’s missions. In March, for example, broadband Internet provider Hughes Network Systems LLC switched the launch of its Spaceway-3 satellite to a competing company.

Although operations have been grounded for the majority of the year, Sea Launch said it has not permanently lost any customers. And some experts believe there will be few lasting effects from the explosion as long as it not soon followed by another.

“The industry does understand that this happens; it’s just part of the game,” said Max Engel, a telecommunications analyst with Frost & Sullivan Inc. “What will destroy you is not having a failure, but having the perception that your vehicle is systemically flawed. The danger of failing twice in a row is that it will feed the idea that they can’t get it right.”

Solid rocket

But Engel considers the Zenit a generally reliable rocket and believes with all the attention this launch will receive, the mission should go off well. Caceres of Teal Group agreed it is unlikely there would be a successive failure but that the stakes were higher than ever for Sea Launch.

“This is a pretty tight market and when you lose a customer to another company, it can be hard to get them back,” Caceres said. “But the company has a very good reputation and its launch success rate is very good.”

The company itself is downplaying the significance of this week’s launch. It has noted that a modified version of the rocket using the same type of engine that had failed was launched successfully by one of the company’s Russian partners in June.

Indeed, it has decided to go ahead and stream the latest launch live on the Web once again, taking the risk that another one of its failures will be documented worldwide.

“We’re not even looking at this as a return to flight,” Korn said. “The part that failed has already been exonerated.”