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I used to work on the Atlas V as well.. and I applaud SpaceX's efforts. The reliability of traditional launch vehicles like the Delta and Atlas have come at the cost of innovation. The fundamental design hasn't changed in decades. Private efforts like SpaceX promise a return to innovation.

Low-cost launches make it possible to try experiments that would just be untenable on traditional launch vehicles. Lower costs lead to more innovation, at the expense of some (acceptable) risk.

I'd hop on a SpaceX launch vehicle tomorrow. Seriously. The opportunity to go to space is too compelling -- I'm willing to take the risk, and I'm sure many other people would as well. I really hope this can usher in a new era of manned space exploration.

Your argument holds well for military and large commercial payloads, though -- When the cost of the payload approaches the cost of the launch (100-500MM+), it makes sense to fly on the most proven hardware.

There are more than 10x as many people who can pay $1M for a launch than there are who can pay $10M.

We've seen this before many times before.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex... Auspex vs Network Appliance, (early) Ford vs all the luxury car makers, and so on.

> And if you were to hop on a rocket, would you pick the one that had a severe failure within the past few years, or one that has been operating as engineered for the past 20-30 years?

Except that that's not the choice that I have. My choice is between going up on a rocket with a 5% chance of failure or not going at all.

Yes, there are folks who won't take that 5% chance, but there are a lot that will.

Well, I think the failure rate is somewhere around 60% not 5% (I think out of the 5 Falcon 1 launches, only 2 succeeded). But over time, that figure will go down dramatically as they perfect their model (hopefully). Anyways, if you really wanted to catch a flight to space there are other options. It's reported that you can buy a seat on the Russian Soyuz which is very reliable. If you want to go for lower earth orbit, then those distances are easier and cheaper to reach, and I believe there are other commercial craft right now.

One thing that is often overlooked is that I think current aerospace companies have regulated profit margins if they do business with the government. So they don't have the incentive to make cheaper space craft even if they thought it would be a good idea. I'm not sure if SpaceX are subject to those same laws and regulations. But it would be a tragedy if they were able to operate with lower standards.

On SpaceX's failure rate, I think I should point out that it was the first 3 that failed, and have learned from each failure. There are too few launches to do statistics on, but it doesn't seem to me that we can infer from past events that the 6th launch has a 60% failure rate.

Cost plus doesn't seem to be helping the situation, but the fact that so much of American space technology is ITAR-controlled seems to be far more detrimental. For those that don't know, ITAR[1] effectively prevents critical spacecraft components from being exported to non-US persons, and even the technical details must be kept secret. All this means is that other countries design and build their own components (including software) from scratch, and American companies can't even compete with them in non-US markets.

ITAR is a major hassle, but the consequences are too severe for any company or individual to try to take matters into their own hands (i.e. release ITAR stuff anyways). There needs to be legislation to fix this.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITAR

> Anyways, if you really wanted to catch a flight to space there are other options. It's reported that you can buy a seat on the Russian Soyuz which is very reliable.

Soyuz was $20M before they raised their prices.

> If you want to go for lower earth orbit, then those distances are easier and cheaper to reach, and I believe there are other commercial craft right now.

Virgin Space still hasn't flown so who are you thinking of?

The early Titan launches were not too successful either:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Titan_launches

The Delta's were between 90-95% successful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_(rocket_family)

The expertise of the SpaceX people I've known is impressive. I think it's too early to tell whether the SpaceX advantages (dropping cost-plus, plus incorporating 50 years of rocketry experience) will result in better technology. There are lots of reasons to suppose it will.

I'm not sure if this is actually true or not, but when those SpaceX flights failed, I sent the articles to my dad for his interpretation (currently works on the Atlas rockets). His response was somewhat comical: "Oh yea, those were mistakes we made 20 years ago. Welcome to the business." heh.

It seems that you have some knowledge in this area. Sometimes people who have know-how get bogged down by the limitation of current state of technology. It then requires an outsider to come in with a fresh perspective and fire in the belly. Yes, they may fail hundreds of time, but there is a chance that during the process they can do a breakthrough which the well funded gov labs had overlooked. If it has not worked for past 30 years (cheap space travel), i bet it is a good idea to stoke up these innovative companies and see the results.

> SpaceX seems more to me like fast food

And this is a bad thing?

>>If you had to put up sensitive cargo (commercial or military) that costs on the order of $100 million

Some payloads will always be that expensive.

But I've seen quite knowledgeable people (Henry Spencer etc) who argued that the launch costs are driving the cargo costs. With a launch cost of X 000 dollars/lbs, then you have a large incentive to remove weight.

As I understand it, some problems can be solved easily if you can throw weight at them (e.g. temperature control, vibrations?). You can earn money by weight addition reusing common satellite platforms, etc.

So, as I've understood it, lower prices on launch will lower payload costs.