This disaster may have bigger implications for Spacecom. They were in the middle of being acquired by Beijing Xinwei and the successful launch of Amos 6 was supposed to be a factor in closing the deal[1]. I have no idea what blowing up on the pad means for the merger.
It's a deal breaker most likely, the terms of the deal were based on AMOS-6 becoming operational by march 2017.
There has been high level of criticism in Israel about the deal as many seen this as giving up it's sovereignty over its space platforms even tho under the deal the all operations of spacecom platforms would be still handled from Israel proper, I'm sure the r/conspiracies is already booming with sabotage theories.
But yeah it's not great for spacecom in general, Facebook also will now withdraw from their contract with them for supplying internet to Africa as AMOS-6 was supposed to replace AMOS-2 and enhance the coverage over Africa and the Middle East.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Amos-6-K...
Israel is one of the few countries that is pushing satellite coverage in the area, AMOS-6 was supposed to grant up to 20gbps of bandwidth to Africa over the leased Ka band which was desperately needed.
This is in the realm of conspiracy theory. No evidence points to this. Nothing the parent comment said suggests it. I think you are filling in the blanks with your own hypotheses but they're accusatory shots in the dark at this point. It's possible, sure, but so are a lot of things.
This waving of tinfoil is making me wonder just how vulnerable a rocket like this would be to a sniper rifle bullet. I mean, it's pretty big, and it's full of all sorts of explosive goodies. I'd expect the chances of something going wrong if it's hit by a shot just as it lights up for a test run to be rather high.
Edit: Now imagine if last week you'd shorted as much stock as you could in the companies involved...
I like the way you think. How could someone determine if this occurred? Rocket sabotage seems like a rather perfect crime, very little evidence is left afterwards.
Sounds like SpaceX just killed multiple deals for this company. Could someone who knows about this kind of stuff (I assume this subset of the population is small) comment on whether there is recourse against SpaceX for losing the payload?
Quite possibly with a termination clause. Insurance typically covers the cost of the satellite, not the cost of delaying time to revenue by what could end up being several months or years.
Private launches are required to carry insurance in order to receive a license; I looked it up when the Orbital rocket had a similar RUD, and the government had mandated something like $140 million or so between government property contingency and general liability, if I recall.
It's possible to insure against business risk as well as asset risk, though it's usually not worth the premium. Though I've never been in the space business I would be surprised if it were not common for launches.
There is zero need for your tone towards a user asking a simple question. He didn't know, he asked in a nice manner and it was an innocent question. How do you expect someone to learn or be comfortably asking questions on HN if they're told they aren't a "literate adult" for not knowing the specifics of insurance coverage within a high risk business sector.
Not all launches are insured. One of the largest satellite TV companies in America claims to have launched their first satellite without insurance because they were so strapped for cash.
Anyone know if the satellite owner took out pre-launch and transit insurance? That's a separate insurance cover from launch insurance. Satellite launch insurance starts at normal ignition and usually ends with the satellite in the desired orbit.[1]
It takes years to build a satellite, the bus, and every component is purposely built each component and the satellite itself goes through months of testing and even if they could build one within 6 months all of the contracts would expire by then which will require Spacecom to open the bids again.
All of the contracts were based on AMOS-6 being operational by a given date, AMOS-6 has been "under construction" for probably 4-5 years, SpaceX was selected as the launch contractor in late 2012 originally for a mid 2015 launch but the launch was delayed for various reasons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
Based on what others have posted, it's not necessarily a clause like, "If you launch successfully, we go ahead with the deal", but rather a clause like, "If the satellite is operational within X amount of time, we will go ahead with the deal."
This explosion probably put them way past the X amount of time so the deal would fall through.
Your legal and technical claims sound highly questionable to me. Satellite operators are not responsible for the successful operation of the launch vehicle, and one would expect their contractual arrangements to reflect that. That would be like firing someone because their commuter train derailed and they were late to work as a result.
It's irrational to argue that you would pull out of a merger because a 3rd party's rocket failure delayed a launch. Contracts almost invariably include escape clauses to avoid liability for matters that are outside the control of the parties. If the launch was already scheduled at the time of the merger agreement (which seems likely, a rocket launch is not the sort of thing you arrange at the last minute) then Beijing Xinwei would be expected to factor the risks into its pricing calculations.
The failure of the launch changes the real world situation. It's not irrational to argue that such a change also changes the pros/cons of a merger. The fact that it was related to a 3rd party is irrelevant.
They do the tests to validate that this rocket won't turn into a cruise missile, headed for the nearest residential area. Not an impossible scenario. Lots of energy stored up in one of those rockets.
Just like when we test software, they want to have everything as close to what they would expect on launch day as possible (2 days from now). All the stresses, the structure, etc. That means putting stage 2 and the payload on top of the main rocket before the test starts. They probably did a lot of tests before the payload was on board as well, and those didn't reveal whatever flaw has caused this issue.
Yes, it sucks that the payload was lost but there will have been insurance to cover the loss. No human lives lost, no cruise missile scenario, no out of control fire... this is the best case scenario for a rocket failure.
Nitpick: you're thinking of a ballistic missile. Cruise missiles are more like exploding fixed-wing drones. The V-1 flying bomb was a cruise missile, and the V-2 rocket was a ballistic missile.
If a fully loaded (cryogenic fuel + oxidizer) SpaceX rocket did a belly flop into downtown Orlando I suspect this distinction would be quite meaningless to the locals!
Not sure what exactly are you nitpicking here - ballistic missiles have propulsion for a short time after lunch and afterwards continuing on a ballistic (hence the name) trajectory towards the targets. Cruise missiles have propulsion usually during most of the flight.
A rocket straying off course could either smash into city under full power (thus being a cruise missile) or have its propulsion cut off remotely beforehand (thus being a ballistic missile), depending on a scenario. What kind of a correction were you making?
Cruise missiles are designed to rely on aerodynamic lift (and typically use air-breathing engines, although there have been some "boost-glide" weapons that used rocket engines).
> They do the tests to validate that this rocket won't turn into a cruise missile, headed for the nearest residential area.
In that case the rocket has a flight-termination system, though, which should activate as soon as it veers too far outside the planned/expected parameters of the flight.
For more context, all (edit: American!) rockets for decades have had onboard self destruct systems and a "Range Safety Officer" on the ground whose entire job is to determine if and when to deploy this self destruct system.
The cruise missile scenario is highly unlikely as the rocket itself would be destroyed soon after leaving its intended trajectory.
> Like Russian vehicles, there is no flight termination system that receives ground commands onboard Chinese launch vehicles. Only US and ESA launch sites have such a system. Correction, Falcon 1 did not have such a system for launching on Kwaj.
Phlarp's original comment was about 'a "Range Safety Officer" on the ground whose entire job is to determine if and when to deploy this self destruct system.'
The text I quoted implies there is an onboard flight termination system, even if there is no Range Safety Officer who can send external commands.
FWIW, a part from an exploded rocket, like the engine, could still destroy a school bus filled with children. The odds are very hard to estimate, and made more complicated in that there are few failure modes where a rocket failure halfway across a continent, at supersonic speeds, would reach the ground without breaking long before.
Nit: flight termination system does not cause the rocket to magically vanish. It will still continue on its current trajectory and impact Earth somewhere. It just causes the rocket to stop thrusting and, IIRC, disperses the fuel/oxidizer so that we don't end up with large quantities of fuel/oxidizer in a small area on ground.
Indeed, all it does is break up the rocket. Depending on when it happens during the launch we might still end up with a fireball near the ground (unlikely to be near anything inhabited, though, as there's a lot of free space around launch sites) or with a quickly disintegrating rocket because it's already at high speeds.
There will still be debris, of course, but I guess the reasoning is that it's preferable to have relatively small debris, than one large piece of exploding debris.
Size of debris is not that important: lots of small pieces will cause a similar amount of damage as the same mass in a large piece.
Two important roles of flight termination are:
1. Cause the rocket to stop thrusting (and thus prevent it from thrusting out of range safety exclusion zone).
2. Cause the propellant tanks to be destroyed. This prevents the propellants from causing a large explosion on the ground (when the tanks hit the ground) in preference to a conflagration in the air.
Very often. Air Force range safety guidelines require a million dollar flight termination system and most of that cost is testing and quality control. I don't have an authoritative list of all flight terminations but it happens at least once every few years whenever a rocket fails to follow the set flight path.
I also have to suspect things like isolated, dedicated and redundant comm links with the flight termination system are part of these guidelines. Perhaps even a "dead man's switch" that terminates the flight if this separate communication system loses signal at some point. (Even if this means a costly false positive or two~)
For the Space Shuttle, the flight termination system had two huge 10KW transmitters to send the signal. That would get through despite damaged receiving antennas, noise, or jamming.
Less than the typical TV or FM broadcast tower, and remember there's a lot of empty space around the launch sites. Even ham radio operators in the US can run at 1.5kW peak.
As an example, the strut failure in the falcon 9 a while back didn't explode from the failure, that was the flight termination system that actually caused the fireball when things started going south.
There were no self-destruct systems on the shuttle orbiter, though there were on the solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank. They were used only once, on the Space Shuttle Challenger after the orbiter broke up, but the SRB's were still burning in an uncontrolled manner.
Don't worry, unlike the space shuttle, rockets have escape mechanisms. In that specific case, the astronauts would probably have survived as the emergency rocket thingies would have fired and evacuated them far from the explosion before it could reach the capsule.
This discussion reminds me of the failure of the first Ariane 5 launch. The flight-termination system was activate erroneously, and the payload was not insured. Ouch.
That's not what happened - the rocket went out of control due to a software bug allowed by over-reliance on unit testing, and was quite properly deliberately destroyed.
But yes, Cluster was run on the cheap, hence the use of the Ariane 5 test flight, and didn't have insurance.
"Over-reliance on unit testing"? I have a somewhat different read from the inquiry board report, which says it was a "systematic software design error." Yes, inadequate testing, and a belief the working code for Ariane 4 meant it was validated for Ariane 5 were certainly contributory, but I think it's unfair to single out an over-reliance on unit testing.
The board argues that there was a bias towards believing the software does not have an error. Thus, any out-of-range value is interpreted as a hardware error, which means the CPU should shut down.
There was a decision to not include Ariane 5 trajectory data in the SRI requirements and specification. Thus, while tests were rigorous at the equipment ("unit") level, and there were system tests, they didn't test that case. This is test design failure.
In addition, the board says "the review process was a contributory factor in the failure."
I can see how those can be aspects of "over-reliance on unit testing", but it doesn't explain, for example, how some of the variables from Ariane 4 were protected from overflow exceptions but others were not.
You have quite fairly picked me up on a cheeky exaggeration.
Lots of things had to go wrong to cause the Ariane 5 failure - including bad handling of overflow, as you mention. But to my mind, the universal last line of defence against any kind of mistake is an integration test: put all of the parts of the system together, feed them real input, and verify that you get correct output. Arianespace did not do that.
Well, until they actually launched it. It was a test flight, right? It proved to be an essential and very effective test.
If anyone's at all interested in risk analysis or robust software, it's totally worth finding a decent writeup on the Ariane 5 failure --- it's a fascinating postmortem in just how many unexpected little things together added up to a big boom.
Everything is incredibly obvious in hindsight, of course, but making things obvious is largely what hindsight is for.
And once you've finished reading that, go look up the Therac-25...
That means there was an under-reliance on system testing, which I agree with. It doesn't imply there was an over-reliance on unit testing any more than it implies there was an over-reliance on analysis or over-reliance on the expectation of developing bug-free software.
Oops, yeah I recalled that the subsystem that caused the problem didn't need to run after launch, so I was thinking it fed incorrect data to the auto-destruct system, not that it actually went off course.
Mocking a six ton payload is actually fairly expensive, to get the cg, vibration etc. right. A lot more difficult than payload = mock(satellite);
NASA did it for the Hubble but so the ground crew could practice operations and not drop the billion dollar space observatory, not to try and save some money if something blew up during testing.
And at what frequency would it save the payload? In 85-95% of cases, payload is safely delivered to space, so the dummy just slows things down. In most of the remaining cases the payload is lost on it's actual ride into space (e.g. the last time SpaceX had a problem, CRS-7) where a dummy can't help. There have been a handful of pad accidents involving loss of payload, but they are very much the exception to the rule about the exception to the rule.
It is possible to damage the rocket and systems when mating the payload in the faring, which would not become apparent without further testing and somewhat negates the purpose of this test itself.
The payload is mated early to save time by speeding up the launch schedule [1] so a mock payload would have the opposite effect - it would need mated and then removed after the test fire.
If the organization underwriting the insurance is implicitly and explicitly insured (too big to fail) by the US govt, it might as well be magic pixie dust!
They do the tests to validate that this rocket won't turn into a cruise missile, headed for the nearest residential area. Not an impossible scenario. Lots of energy stored up in one of those rockets
This is a big plot point in the "Twin Spica" series.
Same reason anyone else does tests: Find potential and actual issues earlier than in production. The static fire they were doing is sort of a short integration / smoke (pun not intended) test whether the rocket as a whole (whether the payload is attached already depends on the customer; it reduces time between test and launch, though) works properly. Other tests are part of sort of a pre-flight checklist directly before launch and there have been launch scrubs due to issues at that point already. Every single engine is also fired for the full duration of the flight prior to installation in the rocket.
There's a lot of testing, both in isolation and in integration with other components. The risk of the rocket exploding should actually reduce with each test. Note also that in this case the malfunction was most likely with the pad equipment, not the rocket, so not doing static fires would in this case probably just have meant that you'd have an explosion at launch time one day.
EDIT: The static fire is more of a test for launch procedures, apparently:
“The goal of the static fire is to provide a dress rehearsal for the launch team, culminating in a three second firing of all nine of the first stage Merlin 1D engines to validate the health of the rocket.” (https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/09/falcon-9-explodes-am...)
Makes sense in that the rocket itself is tested quite a bit beforehand already.
Launch pads usually are not built for rockets exploding on them, but as the pad itself is mostly a concrete plane it should be mostly fine. Controlled burn of the propellant, a.k.a., a launch, is obviously fine as well ;-)
Facilities and other things on the pad may not like it, though.
They already said that their Horizontal Integration Facility (where the rocket is put together prior to erection) is intact, as are the tanks on site. But the strongback looks mangled and may well be destroyed. It's also right beside the rocket, so the most likely casualty in such an explosion. Other pads and facilities are most likely far enough away that the only concern is debris from the explosion landing there.
Unlikely, it wouldn't be much of a launch pad if it couldn't handle failure modes for rockets (aka bombs with a hole in one end). Compare to this Saturn V launch.
It would be incredibly difficult to armor a launch pad to survive an explosion on-pad, so they aren't. The real solution is to have multiple launch pads (the space shuttle had three), so that if one blows up on the pad you have backups you can use until the blown up one is rebuilt.
The energy released in the first few seconds of a controlled launch is not remotely comparable to the energy released by an entire rocket blowing up simultaneously. Also, with an explosion, the entire rocket, along with parts of the strongback and other structures it's attached to, become shrapnel. Superheated water exhaust is a lot easier to protect against.
The video points out two of the protection features, but they wouldn't do so well with a RUD.
The tower features - the hold-down arms, etc - are painted with a sacrificial paint. The idea is that it's the paint that chars and burns, rather than the tower features.
Then there's the water deluge system.
In the video, the rocket and exhaust is clear of the tower, and the fires are out, within 30 seconds. Neither the sacrificial paint nor the water deluge are designed to handle long-duration fires from a RUD.
After a 2014 Antares rocket failure, the launchpad at Wallops Flight Facility took 1 year and $15 million to repair [1].
This is a good question. There could be substantial damage. The Antares failure at Wallops knocked the pad out for months and took $15 million to repair.
The pictures of the aftermath speak for themselves. The strongback is a mangled wreck, and all of the fuel tanks blew up. The vast majority of the launch complex, expressed in economic terms, is going to need to be rebuilt.
The Apollo 1 accident[0] was during a similar test (a "plugs out test", which tests the spacecraft independent of all the support systems on earth to verify that it works correctly on its own). The rationale behind all this tests is "better have a problem on the ground, where we can fix it, than have the spacecraft fail in space".
If you get interest in this stuff, the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" has an episode about Apollo1 (and the series as a whole, though slightly dated on the FX side, is amazing).
My understanding is that it is up to the customer whether they want to integrate the payload before or after the hot fire test. Integrating before means higher chance of an incident like this, while integrating after means significantly longer turnaround between the hot fire and launch.
I think this kind of test is generally just looking at the performance of the engines. Certainly highly unusual for the rocket to explode as part of this kind of test.
As an aside, when SpaceX do reuse a rocket for the first-time (I suppose you could describe that as a test-flight), they have apparently given SES a discount [1].
That was my first reaction. I thought they could create a dummy payload with the same dimensions and weight. But, then... unless the weight distribution of the payload is important.
Loading the payload isn't a quick thing, it takes time and a lot of careful work to do. So doing it before the tests can save a lot of time and I'm guessing money.
Loading the payload also requires a load of work moving the vehicle about etc. If you want to be certain you didn't damage the vehicle in any way during all of that then you need to test again once the payload is attached.
Of course normally a failure during a test would be something like minor thrust fluctuations - not a complete loss of vehicle and payload!
Apparently one of the satellites was meant for internet connectivity in the developing world. Zuckerburg is very mad right now. Lost time is lost opportunity.
Everything about Internet.org went in a way contrary to what Mr Zuckerberg wanted.
The bourgeoisie of the developing world he wanted to help protested, the political class looked into constraining it by law, the first world hated it for misrepresenting the ideals of the Internet and going against hard-earned net neutrality laws, local Internet service providers backed off because of the negative publicity...
And the satellites he wanted to use to circumvent that went up in flames.
Not completely; person-hours involved in building satellites, which are ultimately unique things, add a whole lot of experience to people involved in the building and handling, as well as for the organization. Sure it's not as much as a successful launch, but not totally wasted.
I think it's unfair that you are getting downvotes for this statement.
All you said was that it is good to have some perspective. Yes, it sucks to lose the rocket and the satellite. But to put it into perspective, the husband of the lady sitting next to me as I type this (and a friend of mine) is currently sitting in the shelter at the launchpad. He texted her to let her know he was alive. He can't give out any more details.
I agree. You could argue it could always be worse (2 deaths vs 1, a death of a loved one vs. a stranger) but I'm sure the level of badness has a steep curve before human loss is considered.
How close is the shelter to the tower? That's gotta be terrifying. I'd have thought people would need to be pretty far away just to avoid permanent hearing damage in an event like this.
The money didn't disappear, it paid the people working on the project all the way down to the miners who dug up the minerals and the fast-food workers who made the cheeseburger that engineer bought that one time.
Not quite. The Broken Window Fallacy hinges on the fact that the son breaks the window for a reason that doesn't further any other economic cause. That is, he didn't break the window for research, so nothing new was gained from it. Resources were merely shifted from the shopkeeper to the glazier.
When it comes to innovation, however, failure is often the impetus to more efficient design. Not only was that $200m shifted from Musk/Investors to SpaceX, et al, but it also went to informing the process and improvements for the entire project, and future projects by other companies.
We wish we could learn these things more cheaply, sure. But that doesn't mean the world or company would have been better off in the long run had the incident not occurred -- it's too soon to tell, and we might never know.
You can't say that all mistakes are worthwhile just because they reach us that we shouldn't make those mistakes... We already knew that. That wasn't research, it was a prelaunch test, and it failed.
That's not what we're learning. We're learning how not to make those mistakes. That yields: 1) Lower risk launches in the future through better process and better design 2) Possibly cheaper/better hardware redesigned due to the issues uncovered today.
Yes, it is probably lower ROI than that payload getting into space, but it does mean it's not a total loss and not simply a broken window fallacy.
It's more akin to if the window maker also tried to learn/test harder to break windows with each one she installed. Then, each broken window would be an experimental outcome instead of just a lost window.
No, in this field sometimes stuff blows up unexpectedly and it's part of the cost of doing business. It's like feeling bad for a life insurance company when someone dies.
No, I said that the money was spent, not lost; it didn't just vanish. They didn't bury it in the back yard and then forget about it, or set it on fire. They've definitely lost future income though, even if they rebuild the satellite and launch it successfully a few years from now. (I know that you usually build a test version of your space hardware, for tests that might be destructive. I wonder if any of those have ever been launched insted?)
It was also spent on something they wanted to spend it on, rather than something they were forced to spend it on. It's still an interesting point though, because they spent it on something that carried significant risk. Does spending money on a glass window, which carries the risk of a broken window, work in the same way? I've not considered the broken-window fallacy from that perspective before. Perhaps it's not, for the same for the same reason that breaking a window is considered a crime and an exploding rocket generally is not.
I'm kind of skeptical about this alleged fallacy, where I have to admit that I'm not an economist. The usual formulations of it seem to be something crucial missing.
I've heard that many producers of goods deliberately introduce failure points, e.g. in electronics by using cheap solder or capacitors with a limited lifetime. Buttons also fail way too easily. Or think of batteries that cannot be replaced. Do they all commit this fallacy, too? Do they harm the economy and therefore indirectly also themselves?
Or is it a matter of how long the window is used before it is broken? If so, how long? You could also make nearly unbreakable glass (buttons, rockets, etc.) but at very high costs for the company and therefore also the consumer. What role do the costs play in all of this? Is it an equilibrium? When does the fallacy start and normal 'crap product' cycle end?
I've never seen any explanation of this alleged fallacy that answers any of these questions.
> I've heard that many producers of goods deliberately introduce failure points
There are a lot of apocryphal claims like this, but little evidence. Most manufacturers design for an expected life of the product, and making it last longer than that is a waste of money and resources.
For example, you could design a computer to last for 20 years, but what would be the point? Computers go hopelessly obsolete in about 5 years. The only people who care about longevity of it are a handful of collectors. Fashionable clothing is not made to last because people don't wear out-of-fashion clothes. It's pointless to make them to last. Cars are designed to last for 10 years. Airliners are designed to last for 65,000 flight hours.
Products that are useful long term are usually made to last, like tools.
> Products that are useful long term are usually made to last, like tools.
Except they rarely are nowadays either. Lightbulbs would be a common example, but so would be cheap construction tools, kitchen tools, knives, etc. all designed to last for few uses and then break, so that people buy a replacement. The argument of "waste of money and resources" only holds for a single company, but not for the economy as a whole - it doesn't factor in the costs (and energy waste) of replacement and of dealing with the garbage, nor does it factor in the ecological damage created by unnecessary manufacturing.
It all boils down to the standard short-term, greedy optimization (in algorithmic sense) of the market economy, giving you perfectly legitimately sounding reasons to keep being stuck in a crappy local minimum.
Any wrench or hammer or saw you happen to buy will easily last you a lifetime, even if you use it constantly. I've seen some really cheap silverware (stamped out of sheet metal, and practically unusable) and some shoddy knives, but spend even a few dollars more and you can easily find something that will last for many years. The inexpensive silverware I picked up at Target a few years ago is solid cast stainless steel, and I have no doubts that it will last a lifetime; I doubt I could break a tine without tools. A cheap cast-iron skillet can easily last multiple centuries.
Most furniture is actually pretty shoddy, made from MDF and glue, but even so I've managed to find some that I'm happy with. My first office chair was not very good, and failed catastrophically in a few years, which was annoying. I managed to replace it with a much nicer one that I trust to last for decades. (It was rather overpriced though; I won't break even for something like 50 years. On the other hand, I can sit in it all day without hurting my back, which is more important to me.)
I have 8 year old computers that are perfectly good (aside from a hard drive that had to be replaced a year ago, and a new power supply the year before that), a 5 year old laptop that does all I could ask, etc. Computers are no longer advancing at such a breakneck pace that they're obsolete in a year, and the operating systems no longer have a lifetime measured in years either. I expect them all to last quite a bit longer.
I'm sure my washing machine will fail in a decade or two, probably the motor will burn out or a capacitor in the digital timer will fail. Neither are impossible to fix; the only question will be whether a newer washing machine would have enough extra efficiency to make replacement a better choice than repair.
Cars routinely last 200k miles or more, and replacement parts for most cars are easily had.
I would say that most products have a pretty good lifespan. Obviously my experience isn't universal, but I would say that most things are built well enough. It is worth paying attention to what you're buying, but most products are not actually intended to be disposable, except in areas of rapid technological change.
On the other hand, you could look at something like the jet turbine or transmission in an attack helicopter or tank. Those have a very definite lifetime, and a very strict maintenance schedule, and they're measured in hours, not years. If you do all the maintenance correctly, your jet turbine might last 500 hours (or some similar number, I'm not very familiar with the specifics) of use. Once you've used it that many carefully-logged hours you take it out and replace it with a new one. Maybe that's what you're thinking of? It's certainly expensive, but in military hardware you want to extract the maximum possible combat performance from everything; lifetime is pretty far down the priority list.
My reading of it: there's a continuum in production philosophy from throw-away culture to built-to-last products, and the broken-window fallacy (which Krugman, IIRC, doesn't think is a fallacy at all) is the extreme end of throw-away culture.
Building to last means high up-front costs, little flexibility (think of the Empire State Building and how much it must have cost to install air conditioning in it), but beautiful products with low total cost of ownership; throw-away goods are low on up-front costs, and they make it easy to respond to new technology, but they have a high total cost of ownership and they tend to be pretty ugly as well. A society which focuses on quality will be wealthier and more beautiful (look at Europe's low GDP and high standard of living), but one that's constantly rebuilding junk will be more equal; every 1970s Volvo still owned by an old-money family in 2016 is a Ford assembly-line worker without a job, or thereabouts...
Broken window fallacy is talking about the total (net) economy. It's perfectly possible for one person to come out ahead while the economy as a whole goes nowhere or even down.
For instance, if you are the only window repair person in town and you go around breaking other people's windows, you will certainly profit. But the amount you profit will be completely offset by the window owners' loss. (Presuming you do not go to jail, of course.)
Even if they are (which is apparently disputed), pointing out that someone is using a fallacy does not make them automatically wrong. Next time, you should try saying something more substantive than "Fallacy!"
Fallacy means faulty reasoning, not a false statement. It is possible to use faulty reasoning to arrive at a correct statement. For example, "The sun rises each day, because if it didn't then everyone would die." That's the fallacy of an appeal to consequences, yet the conclusion (the sun rises each day) is correct.
Furthermore there are other forms of reasoning than pure deduction. If you allow probabilistic inference, which is how humans generally operate intuitively, many deductive fallacies turn into probabilistic theorems.
I would guess they lost a lot less than the $200m initial investment, which included design & development of both the satelite and ground control systems. My assumption would be that only the satellite itself was destroyed in this explosion.
From the quote below, they reference $85 to cover launch, insurance, and 1 year of operating costs. Presumably that insurance would cover some of the costs of an event like this?
Spacecom Satellite Communications' (TASE:SCC) board of director has authorized management to sign a contract with Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. (IAI) (TASE: ARSP.B1) to build and buy the Amos 6 communications satellite for $200 million. IAI will build the satellite and its ground control systems, and will provide operating services. The company plans to launch the Amo6 in the first quarter of 2015, and its operating life will be at least 16 years.
Spacecom estimates that the cost of launching, insuring and one year's operation of the Amos 6 will be $85 million. The company has to pick a launch company. Spacecom said that it will seek financing for the Amos 6 from IAI and foreign sources.
I would be quite surprised if the payload was not insured. Doesn't make it any easier on the people who poured their lives into the effort, but the owner will not be out any substantial investment capitol; just potential earnings until its replacement can be pushed up.
One could also feel sad for the (possibly millions) of people in Africa who were depending on this satellite launch to give them internet service. The difference between having internet, and not having it, is huge, especially in the developing world. This has real human consequences.
On any project like that many engineers involved will have invested more than regular hours and pushed their work life balance - losing it all a couple of days from launch into space - that's harsh dude
Most of the stuff on which we engineers work ends up in the bin anyway. This is just more spectacular than some manager showing up one day to announce that this XXX M$ project, the one you and many others spent your last 2 years regularly overtiming, is cancelled because mblllmbllbllsometopmanagementfuckedupmbbllmbllblll. I just mention this case because it was the most ridiculous that happened to me but a large majority of others projects I've worked ended up in the bin a way or another, or should have because they are designed from scratch to be useless.
Knowing how smart and methodological Musk is, I wouldn't be surprised if the rule at the office is actually to leave your desk and go home at 5pm sharp.
You are prone to make more mistakes when you tired and overworked and I cannot imagine more important place not to make mistakes, than building a rocket.
We're just past the anniversary of the last mishap: http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/07/20/crs-7-investigation-up...
I also get the feeling that extra sleep and recovery time encourages the kind of creative thinking that recognizes unusual ways for things to go wrong and corrects for them in advance.
Wouldn't surprise me in the least. I know Musk claims that "working at Tesla/SpaceX is like being in the special forces", but there's no way that every employee at these companies has the work capacity to stay 100% focused through 80 hour work weeks all the time.
> Not only that, it's also not really a secret that SpaceX attracts people who want to enter the space industry. You get experience there, you move on.
Which is exactly the kind of people that SpaceX does not want and who should not apply there. The turnover is high for a reason indeed.
Not if you're covered by the "white collar exemption", which any engineer-type is going to fall under. Folks working 80 hour weeks at startups don't get any overtime for it.
Then again, you also have the payload manufacturer and other involved parties, which are not managed by Musk. Either way, a lot of hard work has gone up in flames, and people will be understandably disappointed.
Tell that to the people in Africa who will soon have no internet access once AMOS-2 fails.
This payload, AMOS-6, was a replacement for the soon to fail AMOS-2 which among other things is part of a Facebook initiative to provide internet access in parts of Africa.
I am not aware of any replacement in the works for it, so that service may just shut down, and who knows if it will ever start back up.
So while this might be "nothing" to you, it has actual repercussions for people.
Not to mention the effects on the Israeli company that made the payload. Insurance may or may not pay for the satellite itself (I don't know), but even if they do, they were also relying on income generated from running it.
Actual humans working for that company may now be impacted.
Internet.org was only a part of AMOS-6's planned internet bandwidth. Per Wikipedia "36 regional spotbeams with a throughput of about 18 Gbit/s — on Amos-6 to provide service for Facebook’s Internet.org and a new Eutelsat subsidiary focusing on African businesses. Costs would be divided in approximately equal shares between Eutelsat and Facebook."
It's a real bummer, also don't forget that now that SpaceX has had two payload losses in two years will mean that their insurance is very likely to go up.
Agree. "Sad" is the PC thing to say when something like that happens. In most people's lives it's a big "who cares". [1]
The fact that you were downvoted (at least when I saw your comment) indicates people don't agree with what you are saying and is an example of trying to enforce a particular type of thinking on someone else as far as what they should think or feel.
[1] Of course I wouldn't say "who cares" directly to someone involved in the project in some way then you extend your condolences.
You wouldn't say it directly to someone involved in the project, but you'll say it in a public forum where there's a decent chance some of those people will see it?
Of course I would say it to someone directly involved in the project. I've had projects I worked on go south through unavoidable externalities, of course I felt disappointed but there' no irreversible loss as when someone dies or is permanently disabled. Save your emotions for things that actually matter, an economic/operational setback doesn't qualify.
Exactly. That is the problem with the entire PC thing. You have to walk around on eggshells being worried that you will offend someone and never say what you think. I mean seriously. Be worried that someone who worked on a rocket project for SpaceX might be offended by what I say? I am supposed to not say anything because of that?
There's nothing wrong with softening your language a bit just in case someone who happens to be involved sees what you write. If not being a jerk means you can't speak what's on your mind, then that says more about your mind than it does the world.
Why is it necessary to feel sad and to even consider all of that? That is my point. What bothers you bothers you and what doesn't is fine, less to think about. You can't go around being bothered by everything 'bad' that happens in the world to someone else. I don't think that is healthy in any way. By "bothered" I don't mean indicating in words that something is sad. I mean actual concern as if it impacts you or someone you know personally.
Sorry but I can't relate to this type of tragedy at all. I can relate to someone getting hacked and losing their business or customer information though. That pain I can imagine. And to hear someone say to me "that's sad" about the latter when knowing they don't have any idea what it is really like to me is just lip service and almost patronizing.
Hey, why are you letting this bother you so much? Don't let what bothers other people bother you, I don't think it's healthy to want so much control over other people's emotions, and surely you'd have less to think about it you stopped letting it bother you so much?
This was a major part of a charitable initiative to bring free internet access to Africa.. That's a lot of lost opportunity for business, education, health care..
From a technical perspective, the laser-based communications network being developed by FB for Africa is super cool. I'm sad to see this delayed. Even though it doesn't affect me directly, it hits my inner nerd right in the feels.
Insurance. People don't spend tens of millions of $ sticking electronics on top of giant fireworks tubes without hedging the risks involved. If this is getting you int he feelz then you need to get out a bit more, this is merely a hiccup.
Sure, it will delay some things in Africa, but we can't easily say whether that delay will be good or bad. For all we know people will be better off due to the delay as it may be less disruptive of existing economic structures, notwithstanding their long-term inefficiency. You're assuming incorrectly that the consequences of this satellite deployment would have been all upside and no downside, but such effects are not reliably quantifiable.
How stupid, to test with satalite on-board?? esp considering how expensive they are, they should use a dummy the same size and weight.
You can't test satalite functionality on the ground so a completly pointless risk to include it.
There are actually things to test in the integration between the rocket and satellite. It's not like the satellite is a dump piece of steel sitting on top of the rocket. The payload has its own computer, power systems, and propulsion. The interactions between that and the launching rocket / ground systems matter. Also mating the two is non-trivial, so you can push the static fire back closer to the launch if you are doing it with the payload on board.
A static fire without the payload on the rocket was already done in Texas several weeks ago. This is the final dress rehearsal before launch. I always thought of these tests as low risk, but I guess nothing in rocketry is low risk.
Actually they specifically plan to load astronauts before fueling begins. If they're in the capsule the launch escape system (LES)[1] can propel them away from any on-pad disaster; not so if they're still walking across the gantry.
That said, NASA has raised concerns about loading crew pre-fueling as part of the NASA-SpaceX Commercial Crew development contract (CCDev).
> "SpaceX confirm Amos-6 was aboard the Falcon 9 and was lost in the explosion."
https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/77135388623807283...