3 ms·
You're right in theory but demonstrably wrong in reality. Just look at the failure rate of launch platforms in the last 30 years. If I remember correctly, launc
by akiselev 7y ago
You're right in theory but demonstrably wrong in reality. Just look at the failure rate of launch platforms in the last 30 years. If I remember correctly, launch failures accounted for less than half of mission failures and a significant number of those weren't explosions but burn rate problems that ended up in the wrong orbit.
Rockets aren't mass manufactured and their fabrication is barely automated. Nobody except SpaceX keeps their tooling online long enough to have correlating failures except for actual design issues which are fixed in later launches. The correlated failure comes from the actual mission hardware but launch schedules are so spread out that a second mission has plenty of time to fix issues discovered in the first attempt.
If rockets, which are made one at a time and launch maybe a few times a year, had correlating failures like you said, no insurance company would cover launches.