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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.
Painful, but we'll live. There hasn't been a rocket yet that has a perfect operational record.
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?
Better than multiple billions and astronaut lives lost for a cargo run. Hell, a shuttle launch that succeeded cost over a billion per launch.
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.
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