Bezos is making the bet that the average person is to trust their luggage but not their life on SpaceX. If they take their time and get it right, there are huge second mover advantages here.
Are you maybe confusing launch failures with landing failures?
As far as I know SpaceX has had two major failures since they started flying Falcon 9. CRS-7 (second stage failure during flight) and AMOS6 (second stage failure during static fire on the pad). They had another minor failure where they lost an engine but still delivered the primary payload to the ISS.
I believe SpaceX has had more successful Falcon 9 launches after the AMOS6 failure than before it. So they've doubled their flight count without another failure.
Someone else brought up ZUMA which has been reported to be a failure of the payload provider (Northrup Grumman)'s specialized payload adapter which failed to release the payload correctly.
SpaceX has had a lot of videos of rockets crashing into barges and the ocean but those were experimental tests which weren't expected to succeed initially and which have no bearing on the success of the mission. They made those videos public even though there was no need to. Probably both for PR reasons and because it's cool to see the attempts and failures leading up to their landing success.
Holding those crashes against SpaceX is like holding crash test videos against an auto manufacturer because "their cars keep crashing".
I don't think they're confusing them, but rather they're worried that consumers might confuse them. SpaceX's videos of their landing experiments got a ton of space fans excited about them, but it very well may have created an association of SpaceX with explosions in the average layman's mind. Blue, meanwhile, while it hasn't penetrated the public consciousness yet, deliberately projects an image of conservatism and caution.
(That said, it seems unlikely that someone so uninformed would be a potential customer.)
I couldnt believe my programming friend bought into the Elon hype. Has 3k of stock and bought a tesla.
Even smart people have weaknesses and overlook things. I remember being an Elon fan until I saw on front page reddit:
"TESLA QUIETLY SOLAR PANELS PURTO RICO"
And it turned out to be a reddit astroturfing/vote manip thread. And then I couldnt unsee, so many threads advertising his projects. Elon is a marketer.
SpaceX customers are laying out $50-80M to put a $100-200M piece of hardware into orbit.
It's the latter we're talking about in this thread.
Dan Rasky's (excellent) oral history videos[0] of his time as NASA's liaison to SpaceX for technology transfer under the COTS program touches on this, as does SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell's oral history.[1]
Blue Origin's motto, on the other hand, is Gradatim Ferociter: Step by Step, Ferociously. They are known for moving slowly and surely.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMLDAgDNOhk
[1] https://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/C3PO/Shotwel...
No, it definitely deserves to be downvoted.
It's plausible that it could become a PR issue.
Here is a full SpaceX manifest both past and future: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceX/wiki/launches/manifest
As it stands right now, they are most likely the largest rocket company right now (or at least the top 2), they seem to be adding more order every other month. Not a sign of their customer base losing confidence in them.
There's no footage that I'm aware of.
It's all about perception I guess.
Sure, maybe they test things out with rockets they know are already going to crash. But that's as far as I'd go.
I googled it for you.
>"Zuma" satellite is the third payload sitting on a Falcon 9 that has been lost in four years. By way of comparison, United Launch Alliance, SpaceX's sole competitor in the military launch business, hasn't lost a single payload in 12 years and 124 missions.
>two recent government reports raise questions bearing upon the reliability of SpaceX products and processes. The first is an evaluation of quality controls among launch-vehicle suppliers to the military space program. That report, prepared by the defense department's Inspector General and dated December 20, found 181 deviations from quality standards at contractor sites. Over a third were "major nonconformities," meaning deviations that might contribute to a failure in quality controls.
https://twitter.com/lthompsonlex
http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/boeing-meant-america-cente...
You've totally missed the point.
Haha, and then you edited your comment to attack the source. Honestly the person could have been North Korea's super extra special space dictator and it wouldn't change the reality that SpaceX has a higher incident rate than comparable companies. Which is what OP basically asked.
• Proton-M: 9 failures and 2 partial failures in 102 launches.
• Ariane 5: 2 failures and 3 partial failures in 98 launches
• Antares: 1 failure in 8 launches (this is SpaceX's competitor in NASA resupply launches)
• Pegasus (smallsats): 3 failures and 2 partial failures in 43 launches. Derivative Minotaur-C had 3 failures in 10 launches.
• Falcon: 1 failure, 1 partial failure, and 1 non-launch payload loss (Amos-6) in 58 launches (59 campaigns).
SpaceX's failure rate is in line with industry norms.
While ULA has a perfect safety record since it was formed in 2006, its rockets do not (though they are still impressive).
• Atlas V: 1 partial failure in 78 launches.
• Delta IV: 1 partial failure in 36 launches.
>two recent government reports raise questions bearing upon the reliability of SpaceX products and processes. The first is an evaluation of quality controls among launch-vehicle suppliers to the military space program. That report, prepared by the defense department's Inspector General and dated December 20, found 181 deviations from quality standards at contractor sites. Over a third were "major nonconformities," meaning deviations that might contribute to a failure in quality controls.
Bizarrely, the author here attributes nonconformities at all three EELV contractors — including ULA and Aerojet Rocketdyne — to SpaceX. The actual breakdown:
• ULA: 21 major, 43 minor
• SpaceX : 33 major, 42 minor
• Aerojet Rocketdyne: 14 major, 28 minor
https://media.defense.gov/2017/Dec/29/2001862093/-1/-1/1/DOD...
SpaceX's 93% launch success rate is still below average for ALL launches (94-95%), and has a higher incident rate than its "competitors" in any form. That's what was asked. You don't need to apologize for SpaceX.
Some of the rockets in your "thorough" have radically different missions, specifications, and costs than the type of rockets we're discussing. Let's talk about what we're actually comparing. Orbital launch rockets actually beat "industry" averages by a signification margin. And let's talk about failures, unrecoverable ones.
* Altas V (actually built by Lockheed Martin, not ULA): 98% successful launch rate.
* Delta (entire family): 99% success rate across the ENTIRE family.
* H-IIA: 98% success rate
* Araine 5: 98% success rate.
* Long March (entire family): 98-99% success rate.
See a pattern? All of the above families have mission histories of 100+ launches.
>the author here attributes nonconformities at all three EELV contractors — including ULA and Aerojet Rocketdyne — to SpaceX
No they didn't. Are you just purposefully misreading the article?
>The first is an evaluation of quality controls among launch-vehicle suppliers to the military space program. >at contractor sites.
Beyond reading comprehension differences, I am not interested in willfully misrepresenting basic facts as some sort of intellectual jerk off exercise. SpaceX is below the industry average and way below the launch success average for the type of work they're doing. That's what the OP asked.
How do you get to this number? Even in the least charitable way to calculate it, excluding Falcon Heavy, using Amos in the numerator but not the denominator, and counting the secondary payload loss on CRS-1, Falcon 9's failure rate is 3/57. That's 5.2%, or a success rate of 94.74%.
>Some of the rockets in your "thorough" have radically different missions, specifications, and costs than the type of rockets we're discussing. Let's talk about what we're actually comparing. Orbital launch rockets actually beat "industry" averages by a signification margin. And let's talk about failures, unrecoverable ones.
Zero of those rockets are non-orbital. The only one not in Falcon 9's class is Pegasus (though the TESS mission was intended for Minotaur). Ariane and Proton are Falcon's main competitors in the commercial market, where ULA is uncompetitive.
>See a pattern?
Yes, designs tend to get safer as they mature. Falcon is at 58 launches and is likely to exceed 80 before any crewed launch. Its last failure was mission #29.
>All of the above families have mission histories of 100+ launches.
Counting 'family' legacy back to ICBMs is ludicrous. Atlas V has flown 78 times, Delta IV 36 times (Medium and Heavy), H-IIA 39 times.
And can you cite those family success rates? The Thor/Delta family, by a quick calculation per Wikipedia's launch lists[0], has an 87.42% success rate.[1]
>No they didn't. Are you just purposefully misreading the article?
No, but the article's author is purposefully misleading readers by citing that number alone:
>Against that backdrop, two recent government reports raise questions bearing upon the reliability of SpaceX products and processes. The first is an evaluation of quality controls among launch-vehicle suppliers to the military space program. That report, prepared by the defense department's Inspector General and dated December 20, found 181 deviations from quality standards at contractor sites.
Moreover, ULA rockets consist of both ULA and Aerojet Rocketdyne parts (and indeed RL10 caused Atlas' partial failure). If we're correlating nonconformities with risk, their numbers should be added together. And, of course, the inspector general didn't evaluate RD-180 production facilities.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launche...
I didn't do that and you know it. Those are all rockets used in orbital payload missions. All of them have been used within the last 5 years.
I used some inline JS for this table here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launch_s...
Then why is spaceX at 93%? 2 unrecoverable failures in 59 campaigns equals 96.6% success.
All the competitors you listed have roots in government space programs going back many decades. Rockets tend to have a lot of "infant mortality" that those programs are way past.
Also, some of your claims are value/wrong: the Delta and Long March families are very large and very old and if you count the earliest attempts of governments to build ICBMs you get reliability figures worse than SpaceX.
Conversely the H-IIA, Delta 4, Atlas 5, Ariane 5 have fewer than 100 launches each.
Good data can be found here: http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logsum.html
(ATLAS ORBITAL 325(46) .86 .86)
(ALL ATLAS 582(116) .80 .80)
"If you do this thing that you didn't do, you get worse figures."
Um, okay.
It's only confusing if you're wanting to be disingenuous.
Er, what?
(Missed this before.)
>It was formerly operated by Lockheed Martin and is now operated by United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture with Boeing.
>The Atlas V was developed by Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services
Honestly just stop.
Just like the hundreds (thousands?) of pre-SpaceX test rocket launches from Greenwood Lake, New York to the modern rocket era.