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Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

> A lot of customers may not want to fly on a used rocket though (no one knows the risks)

I am certain the insurers will be happy to take a crack at figuring out the risk.

That matters a lot. Whether or not you "want to fly on a used rocket," if your company can purchase a flight and insurance on a used rocket for a lot less than it can purchase a flight and insurance on a new rocket, you might be obligated to try it because of the decreased costs.

(I'm ignorant as to who actually buys the insurance for these flights, the customer or SpaceX or what, but I'm sure the point still stands)

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Other than costs, another advantage of flying the first stage back is that they can be analyzed to see how all the components perform or wear, and the design improved based on the findings. It's harder to do that when you crash them into the Atlantic every time. Over time, this could mean that reusable rockets are actually more reliable than one-time use rockets, though only if you fly enough times to get the benefit of evolving the design.

If most of the rockets make hundreds of flights, then there's probably a statistics that says the first flight is riskier than the tenth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

It's not a straightforward question whether the risk would be higher with a used or new rocket. Machines this complicated have significant infant mortality, and it may well be that the second flight actually has lower risk of failure than the first. Only time will tell.

Would you fly in a used plane? Eventually no one will care. These rockets will be able to go through hundreds of flights before being retired.

It's not a straightforward insurance matter since many many applications are time critical. If a rocket blows up they may need many more years until a replacement cargo can be manufactured, fitted into the launch schedule, etc. The coverage for that (specially opportunity costs, which are hard to measure anyway) might be too high, making the insurance premium larger than the gain provided by reusability.

I'd believe most companies could prefer [more certain] safety -- which just means SpaceX will have to work on increasing reused rocket numbers by whatever means.

Specially?

You are right though, that there are far more than monetary concerns to consider. Sometimes it seems as though people, particularly on HN, believe that money is the only thing of consideration in any endeavor.

All true. The first used F9 payloads will likely be Geosynchronous communications satellites, where the smaller payload is mostly fuel for apogee kick and station keeping, and the rest is mostly off the shelf hardware.

Alternately, operators of large constellations, eg. Iridium that can replace the payload relatively quickly and cheaply. Opportunity cost can be mitigated if some of the payload is intended as on-orbit spares.

> It's not a straightforward insurance matter since many many applications are time critical.

If you can put a dollar figure on the potential time loss, it's still a pretty straightforward matter.

If you're flying with a "we must get this in orbit ASAP or the world will catch on fire" priority then, eventually, one will probably pay more for that. (the government will contract out a series of flights so it will play out differently for them)

It's going to take some flying for that to all shake out. As others have pointed out, it's not obvious that the first flight will have the lowest risk. It will be the most expensive in the beginning because its risk is the best understood.

Being timely is pretty important in the satellite business, there are things like communication licenses which expire.

It may not seem like it, but launch costs are still only a fraction of the total system cost. Ground for example infrastructure is more expansive by a large factor. Even the sat manufacturing costs overshadow launch costs for most systems. That's why customers might prefer safety until reliability is proven. Cutting corners on launch can jeopardize the whole system.

The fact that payloads are so expensive is partially caused by the launches being so expensive, so reducing the launch price tag will cause reduction in payload costs.

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