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Comment by Patrick_Devine | Hacker News Reader

This disaster may have bigger implications for Spacecom. They were in the middle of being acquired by Beijing Xinwei and the successful launch of Amos 6 was supposed to be a factor in closing the deal[1]. I have no idea what blowing up on the pad means for the merger.

1. http://www.satellitetoday.com/technology/2016/08/24/spacecom...

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It's a deal breaker most likely, the terms of the deal were based on AMOS-6 becoming operational by march 2017.

There has been high level of criticism in Israel about the deal as many seen this as giving up it's sovereignty over its space platforms even tho under the deal the all operations of spacecom platforms would be still handled from Israel proper, I'm sure the r/conspiracies is already booming with sabotage theories.

But yeah it's not great for spacecom in general, Facebook also will now withdraw from their contract with them for supplying internet to Africa as AMOS-6 was supposed to replace AMOS-2 and enhance the coverage over Africa and the Middle East. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Amos-6-K... Israel is one of the few countries that is pushing satellite coverage in the area, AMOS-6 was supposed to grant up to 20gbps of bandwidth to Africa over the leased Ka band which was desperately needed.

Won't they just relaunch in a few months? Not sure what the rebuild timeline is.

No, they don't have redundancies for satellites. It's 2 to 3 years.

It takes years to build a satellite, the bus, and every component is purposely built each component and the satellite itself goes through months of testing and even if they could build one within 6 months all of the contracts would expire by then which will require Spacecom to open the bids again.

All of the contracts were based on AMOS-6 being operational by a given date, AMOS-6 has been "under construction" for probably 4-5 years, SpaceX was selected as the launch contractor in late 2012 originally for a mid 2015 launch but the launch was delayed for various reasons.

Would it go faster the second time around, since they've already validated the design?

The design might be the "easy" part, these are 6 tons of one off highly specialized components with a huge lead time. Each component is custom and built for order by a contractor the lead time on some of them can be years simply because there aren't that many companies that design and build space systems. That combined with the fact that they need to go to each subcontractor and ask them to bid again after Spacecom finds a way to finance it (there is no way the insurance payout is anywhere near the actual cost of the satellite) would probably mean that the time it takes to build a new one isn't that different than it was to build the original.

Think of it like this if you total your McLaren P1-GTR there isn't an easy way to get a new one ;)

> there is no way the insurance payout is anywhere near the actual cost of the satellite

Why not?

Well, in this case it looks like it is $0

:-(

https://twitter.com/pbdes/status/771409425475174400

https://twitter.com/pbdes/with_replies

He says it was covered under marine cargo insurance.

Yes, looks like.

I'm 15 years removed from the TV biz, but I vaguely remember 'birds' costing like $350m to launch, something like $200m + for the hardware, then $150m for launch fees and misc pre-launch insurances. In some cases, I want to say they insured them before taking possession of them, like if some guy at Lockheed has a bad day and drops a wrench on exactly the wrong part, you're looking at a substantial delay which could substantially impact business. Companies would talk up these satellites to investors for years before they launched, hard to imagine them not being completely insured up in to space. Then there was launch insurance and I think it included operations in many cases, TV birds had a lifetime of like 7 years and the operational insurance paid out if they had a certain amount of failure before the lifetime was up, transponders die and they need to spend fuel periodically to keep them in place when the fuel is gone the bird is done. I want to say the launch and ops insurances were like another $100m to $150m. All told you were in for half a billion to get in in to place and that's not including the lease on the slot of sky... I'm pretty sure Echostar was involved in some lawsuits about it and there are probably some public details that came out of that; maybe they wanted to claim more damages than the insurer wanted to cover or something like that and then no insurers wanted to sell them operational insurance.

It's not cheap but if that's your business you absolutely insure it. It's not cheap though. Would investors let you get away not insuring one? Rockets not making it in to space isn't uncommon.

there are some cases were you can't insure, like Ariane 501.

That's why you always build two.

"That's why you always build two."

Unless you're a Raman. Then you'll build three.

Preppers often say, you don't have it, unless you have two of it, and you don't have a backup until you have three.

Sometimes it is better to have one, just a very good one. Depends on the budget.

They all say that so that people overstock useful items, so when nuclear zombie virus apocalypse hits and normals all die, there's lot of supplies stockpiled and easily accessible for the survivors.

That's a maxim for computer data backups as well.

This was my first thought but then again I don't know how expensive the one was and if they built one and it launched successfully, what would they do with the second one? Seems like a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't scenarios.

The payload was reported at $200 million.

Although whether it would cost an additional $200 million to build a second is another question, but I doubt there would be that significant an economy of scale for just one extra unit.

Why does a satellite cost so much? I always thought it was a computer with solar panels orbiting in space using gravitational force?

I think a lot of it is using electronics that are less susceptible to radiation along with needing a clean room to actually build the thing. Not sure if that accounts for the entire $200 million.

> That's why you always build two.

They very seldom do, at least for non-constellation projects. Cheaper just to pay the insurance premiums for loss of hardware and loss of earnings.

Unless you're banking on the sat being operational in a specific time frame for an acquisition to go through, like Spacecom did. They probably lacked enough capital to do so. Plus the failure still takes time to figure out.

For things like the Mars Rover, they built two so that if something goes wrong, they have one in the warehouse that they can experiment with before they try to remotely repair the one on Mars. I don't know if people do that for Earth-orbit satellites, though.

Why does every satellite have to be custom made like this? Without knowing anything about it, it seems as though most communications satellites do pretty much the same thing?

Superficially maybe, but you want to send zero weight you don't need into orbit so it makes sense to build to the exact mission profile vs trying for a generalized solution.

> Without knowing anything about it

Sometimes it's wise to stop, read what you just wrote, then hit "back" rather than post a comment.

If I don't know something, it's far better to acknowledge that and ask than to just hide in ignorance.

They aren't built in very large numbers. There are maybe a couple dozen commsat launches per year, and they do have fairly different requirements a lot of the time. There are variables like frequency, spot size, transmission and receive power, and whether the satellite does any on-board processing or routing or whether it just acts like a "bent pipe." There is some standardization, but not a whole lot. Economies of scale just don't quite kick in enough yet.

There are many standard components, though satellites are low-enough volume that almost nothing is really "off the shelf". The custom bits and integration are plenty of work (and time) in themselves.

Also, we really don't want to have all the communication satellites to have the same bus, and find out years later that they have some bug that causes them to malfunction after years in orbit.

To a degree every satellite is custom because of custom requirements. To the extent that they're not they can use an existing platform, like Boeing does with the 702.

I admire Musk as much as the next guy but SpaceX has always seemed fraught in the QA department[1]. I'd be surprised if they can survive long enough to accomplish their Mars mission if they keep screwing up this often.

[1] Which also seems to be a problem at Tesla as of late.

Sounds like SpaceX just killed multiple deals for this company. Could someone who knows about this kind of stuff (I assume this subset of the population is small) comment on whether there is recourse against SpaceX for losing the payload?

Unfortunately accidents happen, I have a feeling that some insurance company somewhere is going to end up paying for the damages...

It's possible to insure against business risk as well as asset risk, though it's usually not worth the premium. Though I've never been in the space business I would be surprised if it were not common for launches.

Private launches are required to carry insurance in order to receive a license; I looked it up when the Orbital rocket had a similar RUD, and the government had mandated something like $140 million or so between government property contingency and general liability, if I recall.

Edit: Yeah, here's Orbital's (I can't find SpaceX's): https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as... -- last two pages. It looks like they revised this license recently for their return to flight, too?

Not covered by launch insurance (https://twitter.com/pbdes/status/771409425475174400), will be interesting to see if there is an insurance to cover that.

Of course it's not covered by launch insurance - it happened during the pre-launch stage. It was covered by marine cargo insurance.

The risk of this happening was almost certainly accounted for in the contractual relationship.

Quite possibly with a termination clause. Insurance typically covers the cost of the satellite, not the cost of delaying time to revenue by what could end up being several months or years.

So sabotage could be a factor?

This is in the realm of conspiracy theory. No evidence points to this. Nothing the parent comment said suggests it. I think you are filling in the blanks with your own hypotheses but they're accusatory shots in the dark at this point. It's possible, sure, but so are a lot of things.

This waving of tinfoil is making me wonder just how vulnerable a rocket like this would be to a sniper rifle bullet. I mean, it's pretty big, and it's full of all sorts of explosive goodies. I'd expect the chances of something going wrong if it's hit by a shot just as it lights up for a test run to be rather high.

Edit: Now imagine if last week you'd shorted as much stock as you could in the companies involved...

I like the way you think. How could someone determine if this occurred? Rocket sabotage seems like a rather perfect crime, very little evidence is left afterwards.

Your legal and technical claims sound highly questionable to me. Satellite operators are not responsible for the successful operation of the launch vehicle, and one would expect their contractual arrangements to reflect that. That would be like firing someone because their commuter train derailed and they were late to work as a result.

Why did they make a contract contingent on factors outside the contractant's influence? that seems counterintuitive.

Based on what others have posted, it's not necessarily a clause like, "If you launch successfully, we go ahead with the deal", but rather a clause like, "If the satellite is operational within X amount of time, we will go ahead with the deal."

This explosion probably put them way past the X amount of time so the deal would fall through.

Stock is down about 10%. Makes me wonder if high-speed traders seek realtime video feeds of such launches. Is the "official" feed delayed?

There was no official feed, it wasn't a launch, it was a pre-launch test fire.

It's irrational to argue that you would pull out of a merger because a 3rd party's rocket failure delayed a launch. Contracts almost invariably include escape clauses to avoid liability for matters that are outside the control of the parties. If the launch was already scheduled at the time of the merger agreement (which seems likely, a rocket launch is not the sort of thing you arrange at the last minute) then Beijing Xinwei would be expected to factor the risks into its pricing calculations.

"It's irrational to argue that you would pull out of a merger because a 3rd party's rocket failure delayed a launch."

Maybe, maybe not. A lot of things intertwined - moreover, M&A is not the most rational area of business.

Also - one side may 'cancel', huff and puff about it, then use it as a premise to come back to the table and negotiate a much better deal.

The failure of the launch changes the real world situation. It's not irrational to argue that such a change also changes the pros/cons of a merger. The fact that it was related to a 3rd party is irrelevant.

I don't think the USG will allow SpaceX to be acquired by a Chinese company.

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