SpaceX Falcon 9 kersplodes on pad

[LaCroix]

I'm curious about the fninancial repercussions of such accidents.

Who will eat up the loss? Will SpaceX have to refund the launch cost? Will it have to pay for the lost satellite? Is there insurance for space launches?

[Broomstick]

I very much doubt anyone insures rocket launches. I think that you just eat the loss if it blows up.

[K. A. Pital]

You can insure the payload
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_insurance

No idea about insuring other components (rocket, pad). Unlikely.

[ndryden]

I'm curious about the fninancial repercussions of such accidents.

Who will eat up the loss? Will SpaceX have to refund the launch cost? Will it have to pay for the lost satellite? Is there insurance for space launches?

There is insurance, but since this was an explosion during a pre-launch test, launch insurance does not cover it. The Spacecom CEO says says that it is instead covered under a pre-launch policy. Reuters reports that SpaceX has offered Spacecom either $50 million or a free launch.

[Elheru Aran]

I very much doubt anyone insures rocket launches. I think that you just eat the loss if it blows up.

Well, considering that the people making the payload are very often NOT the people putting it into orbit, satellite insurance is a reasonable thing to have--they want some protection in case it doesn't work, because those things ain't cheap. Of course for the people who are actually paying for the rocket itself, that's cold comfort...

[Simon_Jester]

You can probably find people willing to insure anything with a measurable cash value, as long as they have reason to believe you aren't going to sabotage things to commit insurance fraud. The only time I would expect it to NOT be possible to get your rocket launch insured is if the risks associated with the launch are impossible to estimate accurately- which may be the case here. Then the insurer would either be very conservative (and charge very high premiums) or simply decline to try.

[Zeropoint]

Reuters reports that SpaceX has offered Spacecom either $50 million or a free launch.

But we sci-fi fans know that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Launch!

[MKSheppard]

Musk! Go Galt and stop getting government cash. Show everyone that you can do it on your own!

https://elvperf.ksc.nasa.gov/Pages/Vehicles.aspx
https://elvperf.ksc.nasa.gov/Pages/Query.aspx

To Mars via slow boat (10~ C3 km2/sec2) or about 300~ days:

Falcon 9 (Full Thrust, RTLS ) CCAFS 875 kg
Antares (232) WFF 1140 kg
Atlas V (501) CCAFS 1570 kg
Falcon 9 (Full Thrust, ASDS) CCAFS 2220 kg
Atlas V (401) CCAFS 2425 kg
Atlas V (511) CCAFS 2610 kg
Atlas V (411) CCAFS 3185 kg
Atlas V (521) CCAFS 3415 kg
Atlas V (421) CCAFS 3815 kg
Atlas V (531) CCAFS 4065 kg
Falcon Heavy (Recovery) KSC 4275 kg
Atlas V (431) CCAFS 4300 kg
Atlas V (541) CCAFS 4625 kg
Atlas V (551) CCAFS 5060 kg
Delta IV (Heavy) CCAFS 8460 kg
Falcon Heavy (Expendable) KSC 9850 kg

It costs:

$350-400 million for Delta IV Heavy
$164-187 million for Atlas V 401
$190 million for Atlas V 551.

Meanwhile:

Falcon 9 FT will cost $62 million and Falcon Heavy, $90m according to the SpX website.

Gee, lets pay $350 million for Delta IVH to send 8,460 kg to Mars at $41,371/kg or just $100m to send 9,850 kg ($10,152/kg) with SpaceX.

ELON MUSK DID THIS IN A CAVE. WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS.

[Simon_Jester]

As long as you don't have to be absolutely sure the payload arrives rather than blowing up, this works great.

The good news is, you can afford to buy two of his rockets so you have a spare in case the first one blows up!

[K. A. Pital]

As long as you don't have to be absolutely sure the payload arrives rather than blowing up, this works great.

The good news is, you can afford to buy two of his rockets so you have a spare in case the first one blows up!

Well yes, but what about the payload? This only works for near-worthless payloads, and stuff that goes to space rarely is.

Most satellites take a huge number of man-hours to complete and are unique objects. This limits such rockets to launching expendable easily-duplicated stuff like telecom satellites, and never ever scientific payloads or, heaven forbid, humans.

[Simon_Jester]

I was being somewhat sarcastic. To be fair, if you actually can save $250 million on the booster, that might well be enough to buy a spare rocket and a spare payload and even keep it on standby to launch of something goes wrong.

But this is a legitimate point and you will note that I myself already noted that Falcon 9 cannot possibly be a man-rated rocket unless its reliability improves.

[Broomstick]

As long as you don't have to be absolutely sure the payload arrives rather than blowing up, this works great.

The good news is, you can afford to buy two of his rockets so you have a spare in case the first one blows up!

Well yes, but what about the payload? This only works for near-worthless payloads, and stuff that goes to space rarely is.

Most satellites take a huge number of man-hours to complete and are unique objects. This limits such rockets to launching expendable easily-duplicated stuff like telecom satellites, and never ever scientific payloads or, heaven forbid, humans.

Where expendability might come in is if you're looking at resupply of things like food, water, and air to either a space station, exploration mission, or colony. Those are all easily-replaceable items that are nonetheless essential to a human outpost in space. Of which there are very few.

[K. A. Pital]

True. However, in case of heavy rockets... you usually don't need them for ISS cargo hauling. And we have no colonies on Mars or Moon to speak of - because closed biosphere research is behind the times, really.

[Simon_Jester]

Although the cheaper rocket lift becomes, the less excellent a closed biosphere has to be. Hopefully we'll be able to start founding installations on the Moon or Mars when we reach a "sweet spot" where the cost of shipping the needed consumables declines (due to lower launch cost) and the mass of consumables required declines (due to in situ resource use and recycling).

There has always been a demand for cheap cargo lift to space, or at least a niche that desperately needs to be filled there.

At the same time, I do not have high regard for SpaceX cutting corners, obviously- but that's a personal thing, and if they can arrange matters so that only property is lost due to their carelessness, and scientific and exploratory missions are not significantly harmed by it, perhaps I should not complain.

[Broomstick]

Closed biosphere research is hard.

There was a lot of misunderstanding about Biosphere 2 - the originator actually did not anticipate real success. There was a much interest in finding out what wouldn't work as what current wisdom though would be successful. And, of course, there were problems with that experiment that might have been avoided and certain things and people been different.

[Simon_Jester]

Right.

The key thing is, there's a huge difference between building a closed-loop life support system for a habitat the size of a small house, which runs for sixty days then needs to be replenished with a few hundred kilos of consumables... And building a closed-loop ecosystem the size of a football stadium, that is theoretically supposed to need literally no replenishment whatsoever.

The former is a relatively straightforward engineering problem. The latter is a massive, complex, interlocking tangle of engineering and biology problems.

[Broomstick]

Correct.

But it's counter-intuitive to a lot of people that having things go wrong and learning from that can be progress as much as having success after success.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson was on TV not 5 minutes ago discussing this and pointed out that if you're on the frontier/cutting edge things go wrong and learning from those events enables more progress. If nothing ever goes wrong you're not on the "frontier".

Even so - the more we learn to make even small facilities self-supporting will cut down on the resupply needed and the cost.

As much as the material problem, the psychological ones can be just as important. Huge problem even someplace like McMurdo base in Antarctica, which is one of the bigger "colonies" and is only isolated part of the year and there's enough physical space to actually get away from someone you're having a problem with, at least to some degree.

[Sea Skimmer]

I was being somewhat sarcastic. To be fair, if you actually can save $250 million on the booster, that might well be enough to buy a spare rocket and a spare payload and even keep it on standby to launch of something goes wrong.

That's sorta true for typical commercial payloads, but it isn't true for government or science payloads. Those real quickly reach the 1 billion dollar per satellite mark, even with limited series production. High end science payloads can be even more expensive, and in the later case failure on launch can mean missing launch window for years. At one point the USAF put several billion dollars into designing a 8 billion dollar T-sat comm. satellite but thought better of actually buying four of them. In no small part precisely because WTF if the rocket fails.

One solution to this problem is to build smaller satellites and have them operating in tight formations, but for many purposes that's still impossible to actually engineer and implement on a useful scale or at any savings in cost. Then you could have say 12 small satellites fired in three or four launches in formation replacing 1 big satellite. That's where SpaceX hopes to dominate long term with the reusable Falcon 9.

[MKSheppard]

But this is a legitimate point and you will note that I myself already noted that Falcon 9 cannot possibly be a man-rated rocket unless its reliability improves.

Falcon 9 Explosion against Dragon 2 escape speed

Good enough for me.

[MKSheppard]

One solution to this problem is to build smaller satellites and have them operating in tight formations, but for many purposes that's still impossible to actually engineer and implement on a useful scale or at any savings in cost. Then you could have say 12 small satellites fired in three or four launches in formation replacing 1 big satellite. That's where SpaceX hopes to dominate long term with the reusable Falcon 9.

Or just build lots of cheap satellites instead of hundreds of millions of dollars worth tied up in a single satellite.

SpX is looking hard into becoming a satellite manufacturer.

[MKSheppard]

As long as you don't have to be absolutely sure the payload arrives rather than blowing up, this works great.

ULA OA-6.

Link

RD-180 shuts off six seconds earlier. Centaur has to burn 67 seconds longer to make up for shortfall. As a result, Centaur runs out of fuel 3 seconds into a 11 second deorbit burn.

In the best case scenario, Centaur had around 50kg of fuel available for consumption at the time of the deorbit burn. Given the 26-minute coast from spacecraft separation to D/O, the propellant mass at MECO was slightly higher due to cryogenic burn-off during the coast and a quantity of prop needed for RL-10 chilldown and pre-start. Boil off for a 26-minute coast will be on the order of 8kg for LOX and 3kg of LH2 [7]. RL-10 pre-start needs 12.7kg of propellants.[8]

Assuming a propellant surplus of 75kg at the end of the 892-second burn gives this mission a margin of another 4.0 seconds of burn time at the thrust/acceleration setting seen in the closing seconds of the RL-10 burn (8.36m/s²), corresponding to a delta-v of 32.9m/s. So, had the Centaur needed another four seconds to compensate for the CCB performance issue, Cygnus would not have reached its intended orbit. Had Centaur needed another nine seconds on top of the 67-second burn extension, it would not have achieved orbit at all.

Translating these values to the RD-180-powered first stage shows how close it really was:

Centaur had another 32.9m/s of delta-v in it at MECO, corresponding to a first stage burn time of 1.08 seconds.

Had the RD-180 engine shut one second earlier than it did, Centaur would not have been able to compensate and Cygnus would have ended up in a lower orbit. With Shutdown another 1.3 seconds earlier, there would not have been a mission for Cygnus as perigee would have remained within the atmosphere, even when using all of Centaur’s performance.

[Adam Reynolds]

That's sorta true for typical commercial payloads, but it isn't true for government or science payloads. Those real quickly reach the 1 billion dollar per satellite mark, even with limited series production. High end science payloads can be even more expensive, and in the later case failure on launch can mean missing launch window for years. At one point the USAF put several billion dollars into designing a 8 billion dollar T-sat comm. satellite but thought better of actually buying four of them. In no small part precisely because WTF if the rocket fails.

One solution to this problem is to build smaller satellites and have them operating in tight formations, but for many purposes that's still impossible to actually engineer and implement on a useful scale or at any savings in cost. Then you could have say 12 small satellites fired in three or four launches in formation replacing 1 big satellite. That's where SpaceX hopes to dominate long term with the reusable Falcon 9.

How effective would smaller satellites be for communication relative to one large one? I could see lack of power being an issue to some extent, though I presume that is what the tight formations are for.

Another upside is that they would be less likely be be defunded, as I believe occurred with that one.

[Sky Captain]

http://spaceflightnow.com/2016/09/09/mu ... stigation/

It appears this failure may be some kind of freak accident because telemetry show no signs of something going wrong before the explosion. SpaceX is asking for more videos of accident if available to better understand some weird sound seconds before explosion.

[jwl]

On one level it doesn't matter. If you have to use a launch escape mechanism you've already lost in a lot of ways. If you're sending up a mission-critical unmanned payload, that payload will almost certainly NOT be serviceable and ready to be reused on another rocket any time soon, and you'll miss your launch window if you're dealing with any kind of interplanetary or timed operation. At best it's a "try again next year" situation, at worst it's a "we don't have the budget to launch your space probe to Jupiter again, so much for that idea" situation. You can't just shrug, say "oh well," and climb in another rocket for another try; this isn't Kerbal Space Program.

Moreover, that is precisely the question. Space-X is having a 10% or so failure rate in their actual rockets, which are tested frequently, and which is so critical to their success because nothing good can possibly happen for them if the rocket fails. What are the odds that a piece of equipment like the escape tower is MORE reliable, when it rarely or never actually gets used for anything during a mission?

If you're the kind of person who skimps on safety checks for the thing that can make the whole satellite launch fail and explode (the second stage of the rocket), you're also going to skimp on checking the reliability of things that might not get used at all.

Bluntly, Falcon 9 is not a man-rated rocket, and at this rate it never will be. You could probably find astronauts mad enough to fly it, but that doesn't make it a good choice for space exploration.

Because failure rates multiply. If you have a 10% failure of the rocket and a 10% failure of the escape mechanism, assuming their failures are independent you've got a failure rate of the whole thing of 1%.

[Simon_Jester]

I should note that you're defining "failure rate of the whole thing" to mean "both systems fail in the same trial, independently." In that case, yes, you have a 1% failure chance of both systems failing simultaneously

The problem is, this is still unacceptably high for a critical safety system by the standards by which we man-rate rockets. It is not 'safe' to have manned capsules explode one time in a hundred because the escape tower simply failed to work, especially if that comes after nine times when the escape tower was needed because the rocket was blowing up.