NASA's Europa Clipper Launch

There’s also politics at play. Public space agencies need to keep the absolute number of failures down to keep funding flowing, even if it costs absurd amounts to do it due to rapidly diminishing returns. This is especially important to flagship missions.

When I took Ae105 at Caltech, the NASA MSL project manager explained it like this (I remember the numbers he used clearly): a mission might cost $500 million with an 80% chance of success, or they can spend twice as much to increase the chance of success to 95% by investing a lot more in upfront testing and R&D. Now, the smart thing to do - given a billion dollar budget - is to take that first option because if it fails you can try again and the probability of both attempts failing is only 4%, compared to 5% for the expensive single mission. Then you’ve got an 80% chance of having $500 million left over for a different mission.

The public and decision makers react irrationally to any failure, putting funding for other missions and the entire program in jeopardy. NASA and ESA have to make some extremely suboptimal decisions to make sure that funding doesn’t get catastrophically cut.

The above is the example the instructor used to easily illustrate his point but he said the real numbers are even more stark. Often times the cost savings of just building a second copy of the payload along with the first means it costs $600 million for the first attempt, and only $200 million for the second (the cost of the launch vehicle and keeping people on staff), saving hundreds of millions overall.

It's really frustrating that there's not a way to educate the public on simple concepts like this. You'd think the out-in-the-open development approach of SpaceX, for instance, would make it blatantly obvious how much money they're saving by permitting failure...yet the news continually spins their less-than-perfectly successful test launches as undesirable. And space spending is perhaps one of the least consequential areas of government where this failure of the herd to comprehend reality applies.

> The public and decision makers react irrationally to any failure, putting funding for other missions and the entire program in jeopardy. NASA and ESA have to make some extremely suboptimal decisions to make sure that funding doesn’t get catastrophically cut.

Which, incidentally, is one of the key reasons SpaceX has had the success they have: they're set up to handle failure and avoid this politics. How many Starships have blown up? If Starship were a NASA program, how many explosions ago would it have been cancelled? And yet this approach to risk is pretty effective!

The public are smarter than you give them credit for. For the most part space missions are contests between governments and those governed with science as a consolation price. If you are part of team A do you want to have to come up with reasoning on why you lost? No. Does anyone care if a billionaire's toy gets blown up? No. The obvious choice to eliminate all risk would be not to play, but that is not an option; the other is to delay and delay some more. Thus, SLS.

It's easy to imagine 3-4 years of projects failing and someone grandstanding about it, space exploration is a pointless endeavor to a lot of people

Isn't that partly or largely due to Musk's influence? Like many powerful influencers, Musk can reliably rally supporters to even an unreality.

Compare the responses to a failure by Boeing or SLS and to a failure by SpaceX.

Also, SpaceX hasn't had a serious non-experimental failure yet (?). I'm sure their PR is preparing for that eventuality, but when non-fans are upset over a bad outcome and then learn about the risk tolerated, they will swing from admiring risk to condemning it. Imagine the Congressional committees.

Even if SpaceX is super-conservative when flying humans (which we shouldn't assume - cultures tend to be consistent), if someone dies then all that risk-seeking behavior will be attacked.

(To be clear, as long as SpaceX can manage risk in production - i.e., with high-value payloads such as people and NASA flagships - I think they and everyone else should use risk efficiently.)

> Also, SpaceX hasn't had a serious non-experimental failure yet

SpaceX had an explosive failure in 2016 with a commercial payload onboard.

Thanks. How valuable was the payload?

Very valuable. It contained a Facebook satellite (actually a French one) that was to provide internet connectivity to Africa.

The rocket was carrying the Amos-6 communications satellite, which was destroyed in the explosion. This satellite was owned by Israeli company Spacecom and valued at nearly $200 million.

“Meta connectivity”

By some measure they all are very valuable, but it wasn't a NASA flagship mission or human beings, for example. Most importantly, the public didn't care.

You don’t have to imagine it, it happened in a series of Mars mission failures at the end of the 90s that were designed under the ‘faster better cheaper’ paradigm and lead to congressional reviews, the nasa administrator losing his job, and a return to slower and expensiver.