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.

Comments

Re:Blew up one of our instruments, too

[thrich81]

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.

Also for the Pad.

[mbone]

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.

Re:SpaceX too good to be true?

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.