All three times Dragon has flown, it has ended up in the correct orbit. SpaceX also put RazakSAT in the proper orbit atop a Falcon 1. The Orbcomm failure was only due to the extremely tight restrictions placed on the mission by NASA (the mission called for relighting the second stage to raise the Orbcomm sattilite's orbit, but since they had used slightly more fuel than planned due to the engine outage, NASA didn't let them relight, it's quite likely the rocket was _technically_ capable of completing the mission).

Obviously they have a ways to go before they can be considered 'tried and true,' but comparing SpaceX to a couple college kids putting together the next Instagram-for-Cats in their basement is disingenuous, at best.

I suppose the point I'm making is to the general sentiment I'm seeing in this thread. It will take better than a 50% success rate of putting satellites into orbit before Lockheed starts thinking about the huge disruption I keep hearing about on this website. If you were to put a billion dollar satellite into orbit who would you choose?

I think calling it a 50% success rate is disingenuous. The "failure" they had was because the satellite wasn't the primary mission, it was piggy-backing on the primary mission. It didn't make its orbit because after a recoverable mishap NASA didn't want to take any chances with the orbit of the ISS.

That's not a failure of the rocket. It's just the operator of the primary mission calling the shots, and the secondary mission suffering as a result of that. That's the sort of risk you assume when you piggy-back on the primary payload when launching on any rocket.

That satellite is a billion dollars because of the expensive existing launch options.

Having a launch option an order of magnitude less than what exists at the moment is pretty important - it means people can build and launch two satellites for the same price.

True. The highest cost is development, producing a second one is far less expensive.

This is also a learning process. Every rocket failure is something SpaceX then can learn from. Spending more money doesn't mean automatically more reliability in this space.

Planes are so safe today because every failure worldwide increased the regulations for all planes so this can never happen again.

They have a head start, they were able to learn from 66 starts. With every launch SpaceX does they get more reliable.

Right now probably Lockheed, in one or two years SpaceX.

I'm sure Lockheed is keeping a _very_ close eye on what SpaceX is doing (despite the PR statement in the article).

Incrementing the successful launcher counter from 0 to 1 is a huge step. Demonstrating the reliability they've shown with Dragon is another huge step. Lockheed is either concerned (and making plans to remain competitive at a much lower price point), or they're stupid (I'd guess it's the former...)

You are implying that SpaceX is in the business of hello world rails applications and not into serious space exploring technologies.

This company in less than a decade has accomplished what other nation states haven't been able to accomplish in over 50 years of investment in space related research.

The ULA record of successfully putting dozens of satellites into the _correct_ orbit has been arrived at after sucking at the teat of _Government_ contracts for over 60 years. Many many failures preceded their current successful_ record. We are just not keeping tabs.

Maybe we should step back and let the little dogs have a chance at it.

The Europeans, the Chinese, the Indians etc. don't see the ULA as the competition for the future. They see SpaceX as the real competition in the global marketplace.

On the other hand, SpaceX benefited from decades of NASA and other companies supporting the supply chain and needed infrastructure (which is what enabled them to achieve results quickly)

It's disingenuous to claim SpaceX could have a similar trajectory had they started when ULA started.

I will definitely grant that. We all see further because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

I compare the vision and management of an individual, Elon Musk, to bring together the resources necessary to achieve fantastic goals against gigantic bureaucracies that exist to suck up resources without commensurate results.

SpaceX has a vision for the future of mankind and will work towards achieving that goal. ULA has a pipeline to fulfill. SpaceX is just getting started. Apples and Oranges.