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Comment by snarkyturtle | Hacker News Reader

Or when it costs billions of dollars from NASA.

NASA's CRS contract with Orbital is for 8 flights for $1.9 Billion. Today's flight was supposed to be number 3 of 8.

It remains to be seen if they will be able to complete the rest of their contract. The cause of the accident will need to be investigated, changes to future vehicles may be necessary, and right now it appears as though they damaged their launch pad severely.

The CRS contract includes development costs, though. The marginal cost of one mission isn't anywhere near 1.9B/8.

Sort of. COTS was supposed to be the development costs, CRS was supposed to be the launches. Orbital got $288 Million for development of Antares/Cygnus from COTS.

From wikipedia:

> "COTS is related but separate from the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program.[3] COTS relates to the development of the vehicles, CRS to the actual deliveries. COTS involves a number of Space Act Agreements, with NASA providing milestone-based payments. COTS does not involve binding contracts. CRS on the other hand does involve legally binding contracts, which means the suppliers would be liable if they failed to perform. Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) is a related program, aimed specifically at developing crew rotation services. It is similar to COTS-D. All three programs are managed by NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO)."

Personally, I am worried about Orbital's ability to complete the remaining flights for CRS. This is a very unfortunate setback for them.

Oh, true, my bad. I conflated COTS and CRS... Can't keep the acronyms straight. Not to mention CCDev vs CCtCaP, etc etc...

I think it's important to realize that this is a NASA contractor, not NASA itself. Furthermore, Congress & the President have forced NASA into purchasing these transport contracts by killing off the Space Shuttle.

A $200Million loss is better than the best of all possible Space Shuttle's outcomes.

The Space Shuttle which costs between $450 million [1] and $1.5 billion [2] per launch depending on who you ask and still blows up 1.5% of the time.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttl... [2] http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/re...

The mission was insured, and it didn't cost "billions".

but it did cost millions to insurance company

If the insurance company is doing its job right, this was priced into its rates.

Then it cost millions to a lot of people.

Which is understood by all those people when they purchase insurance. This isn't news. Spreading the risk around is why people buy insurance in the first place.

Then the failure wasn't free. This customer and all other customers paid for this failure. Other customers, who may have done more and more expensive work to avoid failure, are stuck paying for this failure. Insurance thus incentivizes a race to the bottom -- using other customers to finance ones own risk.

Billions, not millions.

One launch is dozens of millions, not billions.

Insurance != free. Nor is paying a claim.

That means future cost of buying similar insurance will rise.

Hopefully they had Nationwide insurance because they have accident forgiveness policies. Your rates don't go up after your first launch accident.

are only cargoes insured or is the entire launch vehicle insured? I am curious as to how an insurance company assess risk in these launches, let alone what the starting point for any insurance would be relative to the value of the rocket and cargo.

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