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SpaceX Rocket Failure Cost NASA $110 Million
An anonymous reader writes: On June 28th, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded just over two minutes into its attempt to reach the International Space Station. It was a contracted mission from NASA to resupply the astronauts living there. Today, NASA associate administrator William Gerstenmaier said the price tag to taxpayers for that failed launch is $110 million. SpaceX is leading the investigation into the cause of the failure, and NASA officials faced tough questions about whether private companies should be allowed to direct investigations into their own failed launches. A similar inquiry is underway at Orbital ATK. NASA inspector general Paul Martin said his office is looking into the matter. Gerstenmaier added that NASA is thinking about making these companies take out insurance policies that would cover the cost to taxpayers in the event of another failure.
Saturn I -- 10 launches from 1961 to 1965, 10 operational successes. And that was using clustered engines and liquid hydrogen engines in the EARLY 60s.
The Orbital failure took out the pad, which was owned by the Commonwealth of Virginia, which had neither insurance nor reserve cash to pay for a new one. That caused a scramble to find the bucks to repair the pad.
Practically every commercial satellite launch is insured. Typically runs $20-30 million for a $250-350 million satellite.
Well, maybe more expensive Russian rockets cost what they do for a reason?
Well, that reason is certainly not reliability-- Russian rockets have been pretty failure prone lately.
http://spacenews.com/proton-fa...
http://spacenews.com/progress-...
http://spacenews.com/russian-s...
Atlas-V and Delta-IV been doing pretty good, though: so far both have had a 100% record for reaching orbit, although each one has had one launch with an underperforming upper stage that put it into lower-than-planned orbits.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No they are not.
I'm not sure how he came up with $110 million in losses the taxpayer has to cover. The launch, part of SpaceX's CRS contract, is their cost. The contract says they have to deliver X number of supply runs. They lose a rocket, they still have to make X number of DELIVERIES. That means SpaceX has to eat the cost of a failed launch - part of the incentive to get it right. What the government (and tax payers) are on the hook for is the lost contents of the flight. I'm just surprised there was $110 million worth of food, fuel, oxygen and experiments. Seems a bit high.
STFU, anonymous cipher. You amount to nothing because you don't have a backbone.
Why should the rocket manufacturer pay the insurance
Wait what? In many industries bonding is a prerequisite for simply submitting a bid and being bondable a prerequisite for being employed. Hell try getting a mortgage without insurance. This is so dumb I had to login to comment for the first time in years.
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
Just about every organization over $1 billion USD self-insures most risks, although this is not always apparent because they often use the processing division of full service insurance companies to analyze and process their transactions. True insurance policies from 3rd parties don't come free and beyond a certain size the universe of risk is the same for the organization as the insurance company.
sPh