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Comment by abduhl | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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