>>8314720>SpaceX is abysmally shitty for having a failure rate even that highExcept it's not a "failure rate" in the conventional sense. That would imply some kind of routine operation which is unreliable.
If you make ten million nails and a hundred thousand are defective, and you go on running the machines, you have a defect rate. If you make and inspect ten nails one by one, and the tenth is defective, and you fix the machine so it doesn't produce that defect any more, you don't have a 10% defect rate.
>(Can you imagine an airline with that kind of per-flight failure rate?)Can you imagine a movie studio with that kind of per-film failure rate?
Their Falcon 9 program has involved the development of three vehicles, each of which has now suffered one launch failure involving a partial or total loss of payload. Each one was a unique issue, and the causes of the previous ones were determined and addressed before proceeding with more launches.
>even if SpaceX invented a fully-reusable rocket *tomorrow*, it still wouldn't be able to be cheap enough, because there simply wouldn't be enough total flights for it to amortize overThis is absurd. Let's say it costs $5 billion to develop, $50 million to build each unit (fully-reusable, good for a thousand flights), and $100,000 to fly. That means they have to sell a bit more than 100 $50 million flights to the conventional market, which they could easily do in a few years.
This is the whole idea of SpaceX: cover the development costs of a fully-reusable rocket by taking advantage of the high launch prices in a market full of expendables, stepping the prices down. Even with partial reusability, they could net $20 million per satellite launch, and do 25 launches per year, and with reusable Crew Dragon they might net a similar amount per launch and grow the market with another 25 launches per year, make an even billion per year to spend on development. Their satellite business could be even more profitable.
