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SpaceX Rocket Failure Cost NASA $110 Million

Posted by Soulskill on from the switch-to-Crazy-Eddie's-Discount-Rockets dept.

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.

11 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Blew up one of our instruments, too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Painful, but we'll live. There hasn't been a rocket yet that has a perfect operational record.

    1. Re:Blew up one of our instruments, too by sycodon · · Score: 1, Interesting

      And designed largely with pencils and slide rules.

      A feat that I highly doubt today's politically correct NASA could repeat today.

      --
      When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
  2. The SpaceX advantage? by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    SpaceX policy seems to be to collect rich telemetry from each launch, so that fault investigation can proceed from the data, rather than the old approach of fishing for wreckage and piecing it together to determine the cause. Does NASA do things this way too now, or is it still using the old style of forensics?

    1. Re:The SpaceX advantage? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      NASA pays them to launch the rocket without taking into account the cost of a failure investigation, their process for how to proceed will be based on what data they have available, if rich telemetry is available they will use it, but in practice most don't have it because NASA wont pay for it. SpaceX spends extra to get that extra data, so they have it.

    2. Re:The SpaceX advantage? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

      Everyone collects rich telemetry from each launch. Everyone's been doing that since the first satellites went up. The problem is that explosions tend to screw with the telemetry. You can't collect data points when your transmitter or central computer are in pieces, and you can't get readings from sensors that are no longer connected. Go back and read some of the telemetry analysis from Columbia or Apollo 13. Its amazing how much you can figure out, but it still doesn't substitute for actually seeing the pieces and footage. You need both to find a root cause.
      I'm a computer engineer working on telemetry software. My bigger concern here is the lack of version control at SpaceX. I love them and how they are pushing the envelope, but they change the designs continuously at every stage of production on each individual rocket, and don't do a very good job of keeping track of all the changes. I believe that's one of the biggest reasons for their certification challenges. The process was fine as long as they had a 100% track record, but now they're going to have to go back to the drawing board for QA.

  3. SpaceX too good to be true? by xfizik · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Well, maybe more expensive Russian rockets cost what they do for a reason? Maybe promising 2-3 times cheaper price for the same (or better) service was a little too good to be true?

  4. Better than the shuttle by Bugler412 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Better than multiple billions and astronaut lives lost for a cargo run. Hell, a shuttle launch that succeeded cost over a billion per launch.

  5. Re:They don't already? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1, Interesting

    What contract did they decide on instead? "Here's a bunch of money, no worries if the rocket fails"?

    When I toured Kennedy in the 80's, they said the Shuttle launches were insured by Lloyd's of London for $2B.

    If there's no insurance on the SpaceX launch it's not because they never thought of it before. They may be self-insuring (getting lower launch costs by not requiring insurance - maybe the launch is $150M insured). They may be be incompetent. They may be lying in spirit if not technically to try to benefit ULA because of cronyism.

    [choose one or more]

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
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  6. No Insurance?? by foxalopex · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Seeing how space travel isn't exactly safe and virtually all launch systems have at some point blown up, why wouldn't this be insured? You would think NASA or SpaceX would have some sort of insurance to cover for damages. Most of us have car insurance for example because statistically at some point virtually everyone has one car accident in their lifespan. As much as I find SpaceX a nifty company and a good idea. (It's so far had a pretty good track record for cost of launches) making it the most cost effective launch system, there should be some insurance you would think.

  7. Do you understand what Insurance actually is? by DickBreath · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It spreads the risk. That's all. My house probably is not going to burn down this year. But SOMEBODY's house DEFINITELY will. Insurance spreads the risk among policy holders.

    How many rocket launch policy holders are there to spread the risk among?

    I suppose an insurance underwriter could spread the rocket launch risk (and cost) among their auto and home policy holders. That will make them uncompetitive in the auto and home insurance market. So they'll have to keep the risk amongst similar policy holders for rocket launches.

    Ultimately, just like houses burning down, some rocket launches WILL fail.

    If NASA is forced (maybe by ignorant Congress who must "do something!") to buy insurance, then the cost of failure is still passed to the policy holders (eg, mostly taxpayers). Plus now you've got another industry (insurance) getting their fingers in the pie and making a profit. If Congress or NASA forces SpaceX to get insurance, then SpaceX will pass the cost of insurance on to NASA and ultimately taxpayers in the form of higher launch prices.

    No matter how you slice it, the customers of rocket launches WILL bear the costs of inevitable failure. There's not that many customers to spread the costs amongst like there are for homeowners.

    --

    I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
  8. Re:They don't already? by Firethorn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They may be self-insuring (getting lower launch costs by not requiring insurance - maybe the launch is $150M insured).

    This was my thought. Rocket launches are risky, so any insurance is going to be expensive.

    So let's say they require commercial insurance to be bought, and the insurance company correctly predicts a 5% failure rate. But they have expenses to cover, the insurance is 'unusual' and highly variable, it's a small market, etc....

    Just to break even, they would have to charge 1/20th the cost per launch, but that's not the end of it. They have expenses and profit to worry about. For something like rocket launches? 20% overhead wouldn't be out of line, I think.

    So rather than the 'insurance' cost per launch being 5%, it's now 6%. For a $100M launch, that means self covering costs, on average, $5M. Commercial insurance would increase that to $6M.

    --
    I don't read AC A human right