One has to wonder why it was thought to be a good idea to keep an expensive payload onboard during a live-fire test

EDIT: Did some research, it seems that those tests (without the payload) already ran successfully, and that this accident happened during the fueling stage at T-3 minutes... that's super unlucky :/

This wasn't launch. It was still a live fire test, but as you say, there are previous tests before integration.

> A $200 million loss there, which sucks for the insurance company but better than losing a $2b custom government bird.

In fairness, when did the government last lose a bird? Doesn't the ULA have a '100%' success rate (where success is getting payload to space, though some payloads fail to make it to the planned orbit)

A Delta II blew up 13 seconds after launch in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_IIR-1

I suspect the $2b custom government bird refers to the space shuttle. Of which we have, in fact, lost more than one.

The shuttle was a vehicle with vastly different capabilities, and technical challenges to overcome, compared to a Falcon rocket.

There have been 133 successful shuttle launches, and 2 failed ones.

There have been 27 successful Falcon launches, and 2 failed ones.

While true, NASA was able to have the shuttle program be so successful because of the things that they learned in the previous space programs. This is SpaceX's first space program. Don't compare a "senior" program to a "freshman" program.

Which is great advice - that should temper everyone's expectations of the firm (Which were sky-high a few days ago, when Musk was promoting his 'flight-tested' reused rockets.)

I think this is a false equivalence. Many if not most of the engineers working at SpaceX came from NASA or its constellation of contractors.

I know this will seem like nitpicking, but this was not a failed launch. It was during the inspection phase, which is performed to uncover flaws in the vehicle before launch. Small consolation I know because in this case the payload was lost anyway. But it's still important to note that the expectation of failure is going to be higher for inspection/static fire, and that in the case of commercial crew launches, the crew would not be near the pad at the time of static fire.

All that was intended by my comment was to shed light on what the parent comment probably was intending to say.

And one of the Shuttle failures was actually on landing

> And one of the Shuttle failures was actually on landing

Reentry, not landing.

Interesting question of how you'd classify that.

A design flaw (foam) under launch stress resulted in foam shedding and leading edge wing impacts damaging tiles and ensuring loss of the vehicle on reentry.

I'd argue the failure was in design, triggered during launch, and manifested on reentry. But Columbia was doomed from seconds into flight.

The Falcon only has to solve the problem of getting the payload into orbit. The Shuttle had to both get payload into orbit and return its crew (and the Orbiter, and any return payload) safely to Earth (the Dragon capsule has to do this as well but the statistics given are for all Falcon launches). So as far as comparing the technical challenges involved with Falcon vs. the Shuttle, the Shuttle was solving a harder problem, which I think makes the numbers for the Shuttle look even better relative to the Falcon.

Harder at least as in there are extra steps that can go wrong (re-entry + landing), I suppose it’s debatable which was really a more difficult engineering project…

That figure's low by a factor of 100 for the Space Shuttle program.

Specifically referring to the cost of the orbiter vehicle itself (or the cost you'd incur building a replacement if you lost one), roughly $2 billion is a decently accurate figure. The shuttle program as a whole, yes, is drastically more expensive.

"The Space Shuttle Endeavour, the orbiter built to replace the Space Shuttle Challenger, cost approximately $1.7 billion." http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttl...

More like NSA/CIA/NRO spy satellites.

ESA’s Ariane also has a far better successrate than SpaceX’s Falcon, and if I’d send a satellite to space, unless it would be a really cheap one, I’d likely not use the Falcon as delivery vehicle.

So you would rather pay $600 million per launch with 95% chance of success vs $200 million per launch with 93% chance of success?

There is no such thing a 100% chance of success, everyone has a chance of failure. I would not put ESA more than a few % more reliable. Math says your satellite would need to be really expensive for the price difference to be worth it.

Depending on the cost of failure, however for virtually every mission the 600M$ is a winner this is a no-brainer.

That "little" difference has huge huge economic repercussions, cost of insurance, ease of financing, and many other things. Not to mention that a satellite going boom can kill an operator if it doesn't have a backup. This isn't an insurance case where you get your money and try again the week after, building a satellite is a huge undertaking it takes years to build, years to negotiate the contracts for and you have to do it from scratch all over again if it goes boom.

The satellite build costs $200m.

Launch 1 costs $600m: total cost, $800m.

Launch 2 costs $200m: you can build 2 spare satellites for the same cost (assuming you don't pay for the launches that go boom; and even if you do, that still gives you one spare satellite).

Production doesn't work like this all the time, not everyone is the US government.

Building 2 would cost more than double, or it will take twice as long.

There are huge lead times involved, subcontractors with other commitments and other bottlenecks in the pipeline. Not to mention that even if you do manage to build 2 in the same time window at only double the cost you still have the issue with the launch window, a launch accident would most likely ground the provider for a very long time which means you have to find another launch provider.

Spacecom had a launch window from spacex, spacex has a queue of 9-10 more launches already set, there will now be a huge delay and possible cancelation even if Spacecom had another unit they couldn't just launch it next month.

The flip side is that estimating the reliability of a launch vehicle is an inexact science at best given the paucity of actual launches to provide data points (frankly, there was no real way of assessing the reliability of the Falcon 9 other than to note that launch failures or partial failures tend to occur more in the first couple of years of launches of a new rocket type is backed by a reasonable amount of evidence across the history of other launch vehicle programmes)

Given SpaceX's long manifest of scheduled missions, it seems like the people who actually pay for this stuff don't always agree with you. Going with the more expensive option is apparently not a "no-brainer."

Someone already answered about the price, regarding the success rate, there is a much bigger difference than this:

Space X has had 29 launches, 2 failures and 1 partial failure (F9-004) so a success rate of 89.6%.

Ariane on the other hand hasn't had a single failure or partial failure since 2002 so if you compare since Space X started its services it has a success rate of 100%. If you take the whole history of Ariane it has indeed a success rate of 95.2% or 95.4% for the Ariane 5 version but the fact that Ariane has flown 72 consecutive missions without failure (2002 - Present) compared to 14 for Space X (2012 - 2015) says a lot about their reliability.

Where did you take your $600 million and $200 million cost per launch? Ariane costs are around $95 million, but for bigger payloads than what the Falcon 9 can handle.