> 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.