A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral • Hacker News Board

Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#451

Post by danmaz74 » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:43 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #159

kuschku wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#452

Post by WalterBright » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:46 PM UTC

JohnStrange wrote: post #170

300bps wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're advocating the Broken Window Fallacy. http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fal...

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 c…

> 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.

Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#453

Post by nraynaud » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:46 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #422

mikeash wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the satellite itself had a lot of hydrazine on board. That's probably what caused the smaller second explosion when the fairing fell off and hit the ground.

Yes that's my guess as well. 200 million dollar firecracker

stupid question: is that the actual manufacturing price, or is there some one time R&D and tooling in it?

Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#454

Post by david-given » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:48 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #333

dalke wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 s…

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,…

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...

Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#455

Post by smegel » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

I'd almost be sad but Facebook.

Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#456

Post by nraynaud » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:56 PM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #166

Patrick_Devine wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 1. http://www.satellitetoday.com/technology/2016/08/24/spacecom...

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 th…

Why did they make a contract contingent on factors outside the contractant's influence? that seems counterintuitive.

Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#457

Post by sangnoir » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

nixos wrote: post #423

rbanffy wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upper stage, so, unrelated to the reused first stage. Rocketry is hard... And very unforgiving.

Unfortunately, it's 2 for 29. But if you look at the FT version, it's 1 for 8. 1. What kind of insurance will be needed on a billion dollar NSA satellite? $100 million? $125 million? It's not so cheep anymore, and considering delays etc. It's not such a great deal anymore. 2. They probably should have a "stable" platform and a "beta" platform, with a discount offered for beta. Unfortunately, the "move fast and break…

Speaking of insurance: the type of insurance policy that was taken on this unfortunate payload would only kick in at launch (ignition). Test firing was not covered.

1. https://twitter.com/pbdes/status/771409983074426881

Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#458

Post by kirrent » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 10:59 PM UTC

xwvvvvwx wrote: post #312

dogma1138 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

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?

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.

Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#459

Post by nraynaud » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 11:07 PM UTC

Nelson69 wrote: post #380

phonon wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

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

Re: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has exploded at Cape Canaveral

#460

Post by flashman » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 11:09 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #368

karma_vaccum123 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just say explosion, we're not at the Cape.

Which is a sub-class of anomaly :-) it is really hard to scrub Youtube videos, and I (like probably a zillion others) was looking for root cause indicators; things like where exactly on the fuselage does it start? What equipment is there? How energetic was the explosion (oxidizer only? mixed with propellant? Etc. There are at least 30 frames between 1:10 and 1:11 (maybe 60). There are many things to rule out, was it…

> it is really hard to scrub Youtube videos

    pip install youtube-dl

https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/