If it was anyone but SpaceX, this would be a company-ended disaster. Dozens of satellites ruined? That would be an impossible loss.
For SpaceX it will be an mildly expensive lesson.
For SpaceX it will be an mildly expensive lesson.
Still very expensive, but if a company was structured around building lots of these then this wouldn't be game ending.
Losing a handful of satellites that are produced by the thousands in a factory is not quite as big a setback as it may seem.
Then there was that incident where they launched a batch into the wrong kind of space weather, the atmosphere had been heated up by a solar flare, and the ion engine couldn't overcome the increased drag from the temporarily increased density. It looks wasteful.
Remains to be seen whether this is intentional or not. Given how a few of the satellites had a much sharper decay in orbit I would lean towards the latter. Doesn't seem to make sense that they would take them up only to bring them down again if they were setting them at a lower orbit.
Yes and no.
First, their customers actually prefer to use previously-flown boosters now. Insurance premiums on launches are slightly higher for first flights because the booster is 'unproven'. But more importantly, there's still big costs involved. The entire second stage of the rocket is expensive to build and it's not reused. Refurbishing the boosters takes time, people, effort.
Still cheaper than any of their competitors, and they get it "at cost", but we're still in the tens of millions range.
This is hilarious, and also an incredible testament to the work SpaceX has done in moving the rocket industry forward.
I see in the article that SpaceX is proudly carrying on their tradition.
SpaceX spent a fraction of their development expenses, and now sells launch services profitably for a fraction of their costs.
SpaceX has been a wealth generating dynamo.
Raised estimated $9.9 Billion [1]
Worth based on recent funding $127 Billion [2]
Any perception of overall economic "losses" for SpaceX, its investors, or its customer-partners, comes from incomplete accounting.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/space-exploration-te...
[2] https://spaceexplored.com/2022/05/23/how-much-is-spacex-wort...
Launches are never free. Cheaper maybe, but free is a vast overstatement of what SpaceX is doing.
>as they can reuse launch vehicles
Falcon 9 is not fully reusable, "only" the first stage is. That was still an incredible accomplishment, and still saves a great deal of money because the first stage is the largest and has the most engines, which are one of the more complex and expensive parts of any rocket. However, the second stage is expended, so that's a fixed cost each time, IIRC estimates are around $9m. Even the fuel isn't nothing as other costs start to get brought down, F9 burns tens of thousands of gallons of RP-1 per launch and RP-1 isn't free either (probably at least $17/gal, so that's probably at least another half mil). Refurbishment of course but also recovery ships, salaries, launch pad time, it all adds up. Yes by historic scales this is all pretty cheap and SpaceX is certainly large enough with enough cadence, revenue and profit to absorb losses fine, they very intentionally run hardware rich. In a careful manner it should be made clear, they aim to learn things, but they do push to find the edges of the envelope on occasion as well. But it's not remotely free. Don't forget, there is also the lost time and cost of the actual sat capacity, they do actively want these things and are pursuing a cut down while waiting for Starship for a reason. They need more network capacity for Starlink. Losing a bunch of V2 Minis is another pile of monthly revenue they won't be getting for a while longer.
The Starship system will be a big step forward in all respects, the first rocket engineered from the ground up around economics. Fully reusable and more easily, cheap to construct, even the fuel is cheap. But even there they still have expensive things to be careful with, they've gotten more cautious recently because losing ground facilities in an explosion at this point would genuinely be very painful and set them back months which itself would represent major opportunity cost. And they can't simply spread things out because of the limits of the geography they're working with right now.
It's all still rocket science. Pushing hard in a controlled manner is good, they've done incredibly putting together a system around that and it's paid off. But not being reckless, and major losses are still going to sting.