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Comment by piquadrat | Hacker News Reader

They may not be able to compete on price, but they sure can when it comes to reliability and launch cadence (current strike action in French Guiana notwithstanding). Ariane 5 is currently on a 77 successful missions streak. SpaceX has a long way to go to reach those numbers.

If you're trying to get a $250 million satellite into space, price savings of $20-30 million can easily be outweighed by a long history of successful, on-time launches.

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I checked launch cadence, and I am now thinking Ariane is in much bigger trouble than I thought.

Ariane 2016: 7 launches (all successful)

SpaceX 2016: 9 launches (8 successes, 1 failure)

Ariane 2017: only 1 so far (don't know how many affected by the strike)

SpaceX 2017: 4 successes so far.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ariane_launches_(2010%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

For spaceX they just had one failure out of 8. If they have none in 2017 and they can keep up the cadence then it will be a solid blow to rest of the industry.

I feel it's a lot easier to make SpaceX's rockets safer than ULA's rockets cheaper and reusable.

Once spacex finds their sweet spot in design, they can shooting them up like crazy.

I am really looking forward to the moon mission. Last time it happened, I wasn't even born :(

>I feel it's a lot easier to make SpaceX's rockets safer than ULA's rockets cheaper and reusable.

The thing is that safety is cultural, not technical. It means that everyone realizes their limits, and has a conservative streak in them (if it ain't broken, don't fix it, or so least test it like crazy before putting a customers multi-million dollar payload on it). SpaceX, on the other hand, is all about moving fast and iterating fast.

To be fair, the conservative streak cuts against safety too. I believe a large number of US launch accidents were ultimately attributed to "component or measurement out of spec, but it's worked before so we'll expect it to work again."

Wouldn't the "conservative" choice in your example be to replace the part or correct the measurement to spec even though it has worked in the past.

I think so. Conservative could mean 1) preferring gradual change over abrupt change, or 2) resistant to any change (stubbornly conservative?)

Let's label them inertial conservatism and objective conservatism. Where the former is the sense of "we should do things the way we've previously done them" and the latter is "we should do things the most conservative way out of all of our options, even if we've never done it that way before."

NASA during Challenger would have been an example of the former [1]. In a way that I think many overly bureaucratic organizations are.

The other sense is somewhat oxymoronic given that conservatism is generally resistance to change. So when safety situations arise where the safest option requires acting novelly, who is there to lead the charge? I suppose in that case you'd want a radical safety department.

[1] From the NYT article on the findings of the Challenger commission, "As Commissioner Feynman observed, the decision-making was 'a kind of Russian roulette. . . . (The shuttle) flies (with O-ring erosion) and nothing happens. Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flights. We can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it last time. . . . You got away with it, but it shouldn't be done over and over again like that.'" http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/10/science/shuttle-findings-l...

How can you tell what SpaceX's culture is like?

Note that ULA does change things from time to time, but never does a test launch.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is on the 3rd or 4th revision of F9, but their accidents have not been related to changes to the rocket.

SpaceX is already doing pretty good on launch cadence and they are gone to be way better before 2020 because they are building launch sites like crazy. Neither Arianspace or ULA will be able to keep up (they are simply not expanding their launch sites at the same rate).

You have a point on reliability, but I would ask you to consider that both Arianspace and ULA is pushing hard to get a new launch vehicle. There is no way, they would be doing that if they thought reliability was their big money maker. Additionally with their new rockets, that reliability will be mostly gone. Vulcan and Arian 6 need to build up a record as well, and that will be hard because they will both be very limited in launch cadence just because they don't actually have enough commercial flights.

I made a similar comment before, but the launch cadence is key in that it enables new markets.

If it takes two years to get your heavy launch payload scheduled then of course a ~$10M price difference is dwarfed by making sure nothing goes wrong on your end.

If SpaceX can reschedule you in a much tighter timeline, for a competitive or cheaper price, then simply building two payloads and skipping some of the exhaustive QA starts to make sense in a way it simply didn't before.

And as the market shifts to that kind of thinking, there's more business for rocket companies that can provide a quicker cadence, which allows them to grow farther, which reduces costs, etc.

And anyone who doesn't have a reusable product or expandability to match isn't able to take advantage of the new market reality.

Arianspace and ULA are building new rockets to reduce costs. So there's a datapoint for how those 2 companies balance reliability vs cost.

Note that Atlas V had zero failures when it was young. So there's proof that new development doesn't necessarily hurt reliability. You're correct that the track record of reliability will be absent for the first couple of dozen launches, which will be quite a while for at least Arianspace.

The Atlas V was built off the Atlas 3, so it wasn't totally starting from scratch. They kept the RD-180 engine, rebuilt the booster, and added strap-ons.

Also the Atlas program has about 40 years of experience on SpaceX. But I should point out they've also maintained their glittering track record while regularly upgrading their rockets, so they've shown it can be done.

Is the satellite that expensive? I would have thought that the cost to develop it (R&D) would be very high, but the cost to produce one actual satellite unit (given the R&D money are already spent) wouldn't be a quarter billion dollars.

Numbers aren't always easy to come by, but e.g. Amos 6, a more or less run-of-the-mill communications satellite that was destroyed when a Falcon 9 exploded during fueling operations, reportedly cost around $200 million.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/spacex-explosion-amo...

Surely the two questions are "price to insure against failure" and "business risk involved if launch delayed by needing to build a new one"?

Insurance for a launch is currently very expensive. My friends in the industry tell me that insuring a launch increases the cost by 50%.

The wording on that is misleading, you insure the satellite AND launch and then measured things in terms of launch cost. Industry has ~95% success rate so insurance is limited to around 10% of total costs or basically nobody would use it.

Further, insuring a 5% risk to a 200m satellite and a 100m launch vs a 200m satellite and a 50m launch at 10% failure rate would not be 2x because the payout is 50m less. Also, if the numbers get overly lopsided SpaceX would offer insurance for it's customers at close to the actual risk adjusted costs.

Also, to be clear, in terms of reliability concerns vs your choice of launch provider the important thing is the marginal cost of insurance for company A vs company B.

As you say, if the insurance market were utterly deliquent it's inevitable that SpaceX would resolve the issue but I very much doubt it is. I wonder if it's done through lloyds...

An Atlas V with the strap-on boosters is roughly equivalent to the Falcon 9 FT, it's about $150M (about $110M without the strap-ons). A brand new Falcon 9 non-reusable is around $65M?

You have a $200M satellite. Insurance on a Falcon 9 launch is $20M, your costs now are $85M. Even forgoing insurance on the Atlas V can't bridge the gap, and SpaceX's launch cadence is getting so rapid that you should be able to launch much sooner too.

Insurance rates aren't 10%, they're closer to 5%: http://spacenews.com/space-insurers-warn-that-current-low-ra... -- and note that 5% includes coverage of the 1st year of the satellite, and not just the launch.

Also, using a "flight tested" Falcon 9 apparently does not significantly raise the insurance rate: http://www.floridatoday.com/story/tech/science/space/spacex/... "In one measure of the mission’s perceived risk, Halliwell said that the insurance rates SES is paying “did not materially change” from a typical launch on a new rocket."

I wouldn't expect it to, and over time the insurance cost for used boosters may even be less if it turns out there are more failures related to manufacturing defects than damage from previous flights. Though it's going to be awhile before we know one way or the other.

Depends on the satellite. A cubesat is very cheap, a large commsat might be in the 100s of millions range, military surveillance satellites might be in the billions. But in general we should expect a world with cheaper launches to lead to an equilibrium where the average satellite gets less expensive.

To put this into perspective: the Planetary Society solar sail cubesats have a novel design, cost about $1 million apiece, and mass ~ 3kg. Falcon 9 costs about $12,000/kg for a GTO launch. The cubesat dispenser does have mass, but as you can see, the launch cost is still << satellite cost.

Amateur radio cubesats, which use 100% volunteer labor, appear to cost ~ $50,000 for a 3kg satellite. Launch cost is significant for them.

The thing I always forget is just how cold it is up there. You remember when your physics teacher dipped things in liquid nitrogen and smashed them? Well it's 70 degrees colder than that.

And then there's the radiation, the liftoff stresses, vacuum welding, and the complete inability to repair the thing after launch.

The problem is heat, not cold.

I could argue that SpaceX might be better targeted for manned flights, given that meat-loads can be replaced essentially for free, given the huge line of people willing to be sent to space even at significant risk.

Wouldn't a price reduction of that size open up a new market for smaller clients? Companies who couldn't afford it before would now be able to consider it.

Yes. It should open up the market to stuff that most of us can't yet imagine, but I'm sure someone somewhere is.

Probably just on the savings on insurance.

20-30 million extra for insurance would take an ~85% success rate and SpaceX is well past that. Industry average being 95% and SpaceX is around 93%.

Note: at ~95% you would expect very long stings of successes not just 19 then one failure repeat. But, it's reasonable for those long strings to represent an increasing probability of success over time.

There are no fundamental reasons to believe that SpaceX can and will not reach a similar level of reliability.

Optimism regarding future performance is not the same as a proven record.

Is this a jab at SpaceX or Ariane?

One of these has a proven record in conventional launches and the other has a track record of innovating. Only one of these is required today.

There are no fundamental reasons to believe that Ariane space and others can and will not reach a similar level of cost cutting by the time Space X gets anywhere near them in reliability level.

Yes there is. We know the target that they are planning for it. Those targets are for 2020 and beyond and its already more then you pay for a F9 now.

Yes, maybe sometime after 2025ish they might have their so far completely theoretical re-usability plan in action. Even then, they are still throwing away far more stuff then SpaceX. They throw away a very expensive upper stage, solid fuel boosters and most of the core itself.

Additionally and that is not talked about enough, Arianspace can only compete on price at this level with Arian 6 because the development cost is majority funded by ESA (and co). They don't have to put that in their launch price. So Arianspace is essentially completely unable to compete with SpaceX in terms of cost.

As long as the Arian 6 flies, it well simply never be competitive in cost with the Falcon 9. Even in price it will not be competitive. The architecture of Arian 6 as currently planed is just not designed for it.

The national champions are going to have a difficult time matching SpaceX on cost if for no other reason than the respective governments will force inefficiencies on these organizations by dictating where the rockets are built and by whom. That's what made the shuttle so damn expensive.

SpaceX won't be immune from this sort of meddling, but it's in a much better position to resist than, say, Arianespace or Roscosmos.

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