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I used to work on satellites and so I know how sad a day this is for some people. Think of the team that would be involved in a billion dollar NASA probe. There

by pilom 9y ago

I used to work on satellites and so I know how sad a day this is for some people. Think of the team that would be involved in a billion dollar NASA probe. There would be thousands of people involved from component manufacture to ground control to data processing to ground stations. A team just like that has just had more than 5 years of their life's work go up in smoke. Classified or not, it's still a sad day for space engineers today.

voodooranger 9y ago
I’ve never worked on satellites but isn’t the engineering not lost at all? What’s lost is all the manufacturing and verification that went into this one copy. Wouldn’t manufacturing a second copy be like an order of magnitude less effort/cost? Or is the cost of a satellite mostly just manufacturing?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- subway 9y ago
  I too have no experience with satellites, but I imagine a project may not be able to survive the financial burden of a loss.
  - regularfry 9y ago
    I used to know someone involved in launch insurance. It's a thing. Presumably not one available to super secret squirrel launches like this, though (although one might guess that Northrop could sort something out).
    - pilom 9y ago
      Launch insurance can absolutely be given to classified payloads. My understanding of the launch insurance business is you say "my payload is worth $(X)XXX million to me and we're launching on this type of rocket" and the insurers look at the history of that rocket and your history as a payload manufacturer and charge you a 10-40% premium that gets built into the cost to the government.
- pilom 9y ago
  It ends up being a question of time and cost. Even if you make no changes to the design, the construction and verification of a new copy will still take years (verification of space payloads this expensive takes FOREVER!) and likely still cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I wasn't involved in the finance side of things but I'd guess that at least 40% of the effort would need to be duplicated for a project that size. But most likely, technology will have progressed in the meantime and you'll want more accurate sensors or more powerful on payload data processing or more powerful/efficient radios so you can get more of the data to the ground. Spy satellites only have a useful life of around 20 years due to obsolescence of sensors. So you're going to end up wanting to upgrade the new one so you don't just lose 1/4 of it's useful life. So you'll probably end up designing a lot of parts again.

by pilom 9y ago

voodooranger 9y ago

I’ve never worked on satellites but isn’t the engineering not lost at all? What’s lost is all the manufacturing and verification that went into this one copy. Wouldn’t manufacturing a second copy be like an order of magnitude less effort/cost? Or is the cost of a satellite mostly just manufacturing?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
subway 9y ago
I too have no experience with satellites, but I imagine a project may not be able to survive the financial burden of a loss.
- regularfry 9y ago
  I used to know someone involved in launch insurance. It's a thing. Presumably not one available to super secret squirrel launches like this, though (although one might guess that Northrop could sort something out).
  - pilom 9y ago
    Launch insurance can absolutely be given to classified payloads. My understanding of the launch insurance business is you say "my payload is worth $(X)XXX million to me and we're launching on this type of rocket" and the insurers look at the history of that rocket and your history as a payload manufacturer and charge you a 10-40% premium that gets built into the cost to the government.
pilom 9y ago
It ends up being a question of time and cost. Even if you make no changes to the design, the construction and verification of a new copy will still take years (verification of space payloads this expensive takes FOREVER!) and likely still cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I wasn't involved in the finance side of things but I'd guess that at least 40% of the effort would need to be duplicated for a project that size. But most likely, technology will have progressed in the meantime and you'll want more accurate sensors or more powerful on payload data processing or more powerful/efficient radios so you can get more of the data to the ground. Spy satellites only have a useful life of around 20 years due to obsolescence of sensors. So you're going to end up wanting to upgrade the new one so you don't just lose 1/4 of it's useful life. So you'll probably end up designing a lot of parts again.