SpaceX Accident Cost it Hundreds of Millions (fortune.com) 67
Elon Musk's SpaceX lost more than a quarter of a billion dollars in 2015 after a botched cargo run to the International Space Station and the subsequent grounding of its Falcon 9 rocket fleet, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. From a report: The accident derailed SpaceX's expectations of $1.8 billion in launch revenue in 2016, an analysis of the privately held firm's financial documents showed, according to the Journal, which said it had obtained the documents. SpaceX declined to comment on the Journal's report. In a statement emailed to Reuters, SpaceX chief financial officer Bret Johnsen said the company "is in a financially strong position" with more than $1 billion in cash reserves and no debt.
Re: "$1 billion in cash reserves and no debt" (Score:1)
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In what world is a contract to provide services the same as free money? At that, this is a contract to provide servers in a "cloud", not the cheapest thing around to do properly.
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with the worst reliability record in the history as remembered by my feeble brain's false memory.
Fixed that for you.
No Gut no Glory (Score:5, Insightful)
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NASA is doing cool shit like sending probes to Pluto, while SpaceX is a logistics company that hauls shit into orbit for the people doing real science
This is highly ironic (and/or indicative of your bias), since this "cool shit" was done by ULA, not by NASA. Yes, the ULA that is the same kind of logistics company as SpaceX, hauling shit into orbit for the people doing real science.
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Wealth has its privileges.
Re: No Gut no Glory (Score:1)
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It's a somewhat problematic business model.
If they $250M per failure and have a failure 5% of the time on a $62M rocket then the per-rocket cost is $12,5M, or 20% of the rocket's value.
Now they're trying for two things: a big scaleup, and greater safety. So let's say that they get the accident rate down to 2%, and they 10x their value. The cost of a failure should scale proportionally to the size of their market because it means a standstill in launches, the same reputation hit, etc. So now it's a $2,5B
Re:No Gut no Glory (Score:5, Insightful)
SpaceX isn't doing the rocket business the way other rocket builders do. That's a plus and also a minus on their part.
In this case they tried something new, supercooling the fuel and oxidiser to improve launch performance. Older fuddy-duddy rocket builders, if they decided to try this sort of thing would spend a couple of years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying the concept out, building prototypes, testing them to destruction and analysing the parts microscopically to see what happened to them. SpaceX did the equivalent of compiling the code and running a few unit tests and when nothing broke they beta-tested it with a paying customer's payload on top. Oops.
A previous launch failure was due to a third-party strut failing under load -- again SpaceX cut corners by not testing each and every component, accepting the risk of a failure rather than spending time and money on eliminating a one in a million possibility. This is something the older rocket builders do as a matter of course with the customer paying for it in the launch pricetag.
They're learning their lessons but it's costing them money, time and more importantly reputation. More rigorous testing will push the price of launches up and that eats into their low-cost launch niche while other contenders with proven track records of not cutting corners are pushing down into that market bracket (ISRO for one).
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A previous launch failure was due to a third-party strut failing under load -- again SpaceX cut corners by not testing each and every component, accepting the risk of a failure rather than spending time and money on eliminating a one in a million possibility.
They had a contract with a third party to supply parts built to certain specifications, they were supposed to do the testing. I really doubt they had any acceptable failure rate in that contract, like you might have with consumer toys. SpaceX had to backtrack and say "if you want it done right, do it yourself" but it's really contrary to what they want because that's the way you end up with massive vertically integrated behemoths and NASA-certified screwdrivers that costs 100x what a normal screwdriver cost
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SpaceX isn't doing the rocket business the way other rocket builders do... SpaceX cut corners by not testing each and every component, accepting the risk of a failure rather than spending time and money on eliminating a one in a million possibility. This is something the older rocket builders do as a matter of course with the customer paying for it in the launch pricetag.
This becomes a problem as the number of components approaches a million.
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But some of the things they're trying are just so new that unexpected failure modes are bound to appear.
It would have been better for them if detecting the unexpected failure mode of supercooled LOX penetration of the carbon fibre windings on the helium bottle had been done on the ground in a test rig rather than in a complete stack on the launch pad. That's what testing in aerospace is meant to do and part of the reason launches are so expensive.
SpaceX is now required by launch customers to carry out hotfi
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Musk is moving fast, failing quickly and then obviously moving fast again.
If you try to plan absolutely every thing you'll move far far more slowly.
Also, see how fast we got to the moon vs being limited to LEO for 40 years.
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The thing is... Even by the rather loose standards of the launch industry, that's not extreme reliability. It's only a modest improvement over the Other Guys. (And not worth very much unless they can also correct their ongoing inability to maintain schedule.)
And the 'lower tenths' are nowhere near airplane like reliability - which is down in the lower millionth of a
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It most certainly would be extreme reliability by the standards of the launch industry. The only ones that have better reliability than that that don't have nearly a statistically significant enough number of launches under their belt to assert that. Aka, "they haven't had a failure yet but nowhere near the several hundred launches required to assert a lower fraction of a percent or better failure rate".
We're not talking about airplane reliability here, we're talking about economics (the title of the artic
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To be clear:
* Getting the failure rate down in the lower tenths of a percent or better is what they need to be able to ~10x their launch rate and still be economically viable, since a pad explosion will leave them stuck for just as long and scare off just as high a percentage of their customers whether they're launching 12 a year or 120.
* SpaceX wants to have reliability like airplanes, and has talked about this frequently.
* What they want to achieve, and what they need to achieve, a
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I doubt the tanks will be the root cause of any future payload losses now that they have identified them as a vulnerability. They probably have a vastly better understanding of the envelope of that system now.
SpaceX has basically said that the voids are fine as long as the oxygen does not freeze. If that is true then the "nitroglycerine" in your analogy would be the incredibly low temperatures combined with the fast loading times that they were using. (They were obviously loading helium that was cold enough
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I think once you reach 98%+ reliability the most expensive part of the failure: grounding the fleet, no longer occurs. Once the Falcon 9 design stabilizes this year if they lose one after 50 successful launches they'll probably take a few weeks off but not months on end. There was even a substantially shorter down-time in 2016 with the most recent failure than in 2015.
And the other thing they have going for them now is re-usability and re-use. That could hypothetically result in new failure modes but
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Scaling up means having multiple launchpads, so a disaster would slow down the launch pipeline rather than halt it completely. Also scaling up means getting their insurance right, so that a lost rocket "only" costs as much as the rocket itself. Still no fun to lose, but unlikely $2.5B, and maybe not even this time's $250M.
Could be cheaper, given more money (Score:2)
Your post may make sense, I don't follow the space program(s) close enough to know. I got chuckle from this though:
> They could be more competitive on price, if they were given the money
I suppose if taxpayers gave them a trillion dollars, they could charge customers $100. That doesn't make them cheaper - that just changes who is paying the bill.
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Your post may make sense, I don't follow the space program(s) close enough to know. I got chuckle from this though:
> They could be more competitive on price, if they were given the money
I suppose if taxpayers gave them a trillion dollars, they could charge customers $100. That doesn't make them cheaper - that just changes who is paying the bill.
I think you missed his point, which was that NASA was not given the money to pursue low cost but less reliable launch programs. They have to use appropriations for defined programs, their discretionary spending is quite small.
May have a point, I just got a chuckle (Score:1)
I think I understand his point and as I said, he may be right. I just got a chuckle from the first sentence, before reading on. Kind of like when an old lady who talks real slow asks you "Do ... ... ... ...
you
like
cock
atiels
?"
Or when someone starts out with "NASA was not given the money to pursue low cost", before continuing to say something that makes sense.
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This is kind of an oversimplified view of affairs as they now stand.
The newer players aren't competitors to NASA; they're competitors to NASA's traditional vendors. They probably wouldn't exist were it not for government policy to encourage and support more independent, entrepreneurial approaches to launch system development and management.
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Cost for one Falcon 9 flight = Build a 737 (Score:2)
Interesting, the cost to buy a brand new 737 is just about equal to the cost of launching the Falconl 9 once.
Elon could have chosen golf as hobby (Score:3)
But no, he chose rockets. A bit more expensive here to make mistakes.
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And no Mulligans on your first stage.
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And no Mulligans on your first stage.
SpaceX is working on that too. As long as it doesn't land in the rough.
Well yeah (Score:1)
Usually having your expensive equipment explode massively will have a fairly severe financial impact. I'd hope that this sort of thing is something they'd planned for, given the risks in this industry. Even small mistakes = big consequences, and there's a lot of room for unknowns.
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Propellant costs essentially nothing compared to the cost of the rocket.
Re:no sh*t! (Score:4, Informative)
And more to the point, in this case, the cost of the rocket costs little compared to the cost of all of the lost business, delays and pad repairs.
Rockets are still at risk of exploding... (Score:3)
... but less so than Samsung's Note 7. ;)
Why is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Their rocket blew up, they've been trying to find out why.
(Not uncommon in that business)
Is anybody surprised that this costs a lot of money?
Only this guy is surprised (Score:2)
> Is anybody surprised that this costs a lot of money?
Just this guy:
https://apple.slashdot.org/com... [slashdot.org]
Botched? (Score:1)
"botch" verb - carry out (a task) badly or carelessly.
Seems a bit strong, this shit is hard to do. Sure it crashed, but its not like they are a bunch of cowboys.