Why does every satellite have to be custom made like this? Without knowing anything about it, it seems as though most communications satellites do pretty much the same thing?

They aren't built in very large numbers. There are maybe a couple dozen commsat launches per year, and they do have fairly different requirements a lot of the time. There are variables like frequency, spot size, transmission and receive power, and whether the satellite does any on-board processing or routing or whether it just acts like a "bent pipe." There is some standardization, but not a whole lot. Economies of scale just don't quite kick in enough yet.

Superficially maybe, but you want to send zero weight you don't need into orbit so it makes sense to build to the exact mission profile vs trying for a generalized solution.

There are many standard components, though satellites are low-enough volume that almost nothing is really "off the shelf". The custom bits and integration are plenty of work (and time) in themselves.

Also, we really don't want to have all the communication satellites to have the same bus, and find out years later that they have some bug that causes them to malfunction after years in orbit.

To a degree every satellite is custom because of custom requirements. To the extent that they're not they can use an existing platform, like Boeing does with the 702.

> Without knowing anything about it

Sometimes it's wise to stop, read what you just wrote, then hit "back" rather than post a comment.

If I don't know something, it's far better to acknowledge that and ask than to just hide in ignorance.

That's why you always build two.

> That's why you always build two.

They very seldom do, at least for non-constellation projects. Cheaper just to pay the insurance premiums for loss of hardware and loss of earnings.

Unless you're banking on the sat being operational in a specific time frame for an acquisition to go through, like Spacecom did. They probably lacked enough capital to do so. Plus the failure still takes time to figure out.

"That's why you always build two."

Unless you're a Raman. Then you'll build three.

Preppers often say, you don't have it, unless you have two of it, and you don't have a backup until you have three.

They all say that so that people overstock useful items, so when nuclear zombie virus apocalypse hits and normals all die, there's lot of supplies stockpiled and easily accessible for the survivors.

s/

Sometimes it is better to have one, just a very good one. Depends on the budget.

That's a maxim for computer data backups as well.

For things like the Mars Rover, they built two so that if something goes wrong, they have one in the warehouse that they can experiment with before they try to remotely repair the one on Mars. I don't know if people do that for Earth-orbit satellites, though.

This was my first thought but then again I don't know how expensive the one was and if they built one and it launched successfully, what would they do with the second one? Seems like a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't scenarios.

The payload was reported at $200 million.

Although whether it would cost an additional $200 million to build a second is another question, but I doubt there would be that significant an economy of scale for just one extra unit.

Why does a satellite cost so much? I always thought it was a computer with solar panels orbiting in space using gravitational force?

I think a lot of it is using electronics that are less susceptible to radiation along with needing a clean room to actually build the thing. Not sure if that accounts for the entire $200 million.

Would it go faster the second time around, since they've already validated the design?

The design might be the "easy" part, these are 6 tons of one off highly specialized components with a huge lead time. Each component is custom and built for order by a contractor the lead time on some of them can be years simply because there aren't that many companies that design and build space systems. That combined with the fact that they need to go to each subcontractor and ask them to bid again after Spacecom finds a way to finance it (there is no way the insurance payout is anywhere near the actual cost of the satellite) would probably mean that the time it takes to build a new one isn't that different than it was to build the original.

Think of it like this if you total your McLaren P1-GTR there isn't an easy way to get a new one ;)

> there is no way the insurance payout is anywhere near the actual cost of the satellite

Why not?

I'm 15 years removed from the TV biz, but I vaguely remember 'birds' costing like $350m to launch, something like $200m + for the hardware, then $150m for launch fees and misc pre-launch insurances. In some cases, I want to say they insured them before taking possession of them, like if some guy at Lockheed has a bad day and drops a wrench on exactly the wrong part, you're looking at a substantial delay which could substantially impact business. Companies would talk up these satellites to investors for years before they launched, hard to imagine them not being completely insured up in to space. Then there was launch insurance and I think it included operations in many cases, TV birds had a lifetime of like 7 years and the operational insurance paid out if they had a certain amount of failure before the lifetime was up, transponders die and they need to spend fuel periodically to keep them in place when the fuel is gone the bird is done. I want to say the launch and ops insurances were like another $100m to $150m. All told you were in for half a billion to get in in to place and that's not including the lease on the slot of sky... I'm pretty sure Echostar was involved in some lawsuits about it and there are probably some public details that came out of that; maybe they wanted to claim more damages than the insurer wanted to cover or something like that and then no insurers wanted to sell them operational insurance.

It's not cheap but if that's your business you absolutely insure it. It's not cheap though. Would investors let you get away not insuring one? Rockets not making it in to space isn't uncommon.

there are some cases were you can't insure, like Ariane 501.

Well, in this case it looks like it is $0

:-(

https://twitter.com/pbdes/status/771409425475174400

https://twitter.com/pbdes/with_replies

He says it was covered under marine cargo insurance.

Yes, looks like.

I admire Musk as much as the next guy but SpaceX has always seemed fraught in the QA department[1]. I'd be surprised if they can survive long enough to accomplish their Mars mission if they keep screwing up this often.

[1] Which also seems to be a problem at Tesla as of late.