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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

What's sad about it? They have insurance, it's just hardware. Nobody died or was even injured, so it's merely an invoncenience.

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There are engineers out there who actually care about their work, and put years into it. It's really most sad for them.

For the some of those engineers, its a loss of an Olympic gold...

Apparently one of the satellites was meant for internet connectivity in the developing world. Zuckerburg is very mad right now. Lost time is lost opportunity.

Everything about Internet.org went in a way contrary to what Mr Zuckerberg wanted.

The bourgeoisie of the developing world he wanted to help protested, the political class looked into constraining it by law, the first world hated it for misrepresenting the ideals of the Internet and going against hard-earned net neutrality laws, local Internet service providers backed off because of the negative publicity...

And the satellites he wanted to use to circumvent that went up in flames.

Lives were lost, just incrementally; person-hours in building things that will never add value.

Not completely; person-hours involved in building satellites, which are ultimately unique things, add a whole lot of experience to people involved in the building and handling, as well as for the organization. Sure it's not as much as a successful launch, but not totally wasted.

> They have insurance

Nope.

>Elon Musk has stated that because the rocket didn't intentionally ignite for launch, the loss of payload is not covered by launch insurance.

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