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Comment by darkmighty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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