I think it's unfair that you are getting downvotes for this statement.
All you said was that it is good to have some perspective. Yes, it sucks to lose the rocket and the satellite. But to put it into perspective, the husband of the lady sitting next to me as I type this (and a friend of mine) is currently sitting in the shelter at the launchpad. He texted her to let her know he was alive. He can't give out any more details.
I agree. You could argue it could always be worse (2 deaths vs 1, a death of a loved one vs. a stranger) but I'm sure the level of badness has a steep curve before human loss is considered.
How close is the shelter to the tower? That's gotta be terrifying. I'd have thought people would need to be pretty far away just to avoid permanent hearing damage in an event like this.
The money didn't disappear, it paid the people working on the project all the way down to the miners who dug up the minerals and the fast-food workers who made the cheeseburger that engineer bought that one time.
Not quite. The Broken Window Fallacy hinges on the fact that the son breaks the window for a reason that doesn't further any other economic cause. That is, he didn't break the window for research, so nothing new was gained from it. Resources were merely shifted from the shopkeeper to the glazier.
When it comes to innovation, however, failure is often the impetus to more efficient design. Not only was that $200m shifted from Musk/Investors to SpaceX, et al, but it also went to informing the process and improvements for the entire project, and future projects by other companies.
We wish we could learn these things more cheaply, sure. But that doesn't mean the world or company would have been better off in the long run had the incident not occurred -- it's too soon to tell, and we might never know.
You can't say that all mistakes are worthwhile just because they reach us that we shouldn't make those mistakes... We already knew that. That wasn't research, it was a prelaunch test, and it failed.
That's not what we're learning. We're learning how not to make those mistakes. That yields: 1) Lower risk launches in the future through better process and better design 2) Possibly cheaper/better hardware redesigned due to the issues uncovered today.
Yes, it is probably lower ROI than that payload getting into space, but it does mean it's not a total loss and not simply a broken window fallacy.
It's more akin to if the window maker also tried to learn/test harder to break windows with each one she installed. Then, each broken window would be an experimental outcome instead of just a lost window.
No, in this field sometimes stuff blows up unexpectedly and it's part of the cost of doing business. It's like feeling bad for a life insurance company when someone dies.
No, I said that the money was spent, not lost; it didn't just vanish. They didn't bury it in the back yard and then forget about it, or set it on fire. They've definitely lost future income though, even if they rebuild the satellite and launch it successfully a few years from now. (I know that you usually build a test version of your space hardware, for tests that might be destructive. I wonder if any of those have ever been launched insted?)
It was also spent on something they wanted to spend it on, rather than something they were forced to spend it on. It's still an interesting point though, because they spent it on something that carried significant risk. Does spending money on a glass window, which carries the risk of a broken window, work in the same way? I've not considered the broken-window fallacy from that perspective before. Perhaps it's not, for the same for the same reason that breaking a window is considered a crime and an exploding rocket generally is not.
I'm kind of skeptical about this alleged fallacy, where I have to admit that I'm not an economist. The usual formulations of it seem to be something crucial missing.
I've heard that many producers of goods deliberately introduce failure points, e.g. in electronics by using cheap solder or capacitors with a limited lifetime. Buttons also fail way too easily. Or think of batteries that cannot be replaced. Do they all commit this fallacy, too? Do they harm the economy and therefore indirectly also themselves?
Or is it a matter of how long the window is used before it is broken? If so, how long? You could also make nearly unbreakable glass (buttons, rockets, etc.) but at very high costs for the company and therefore also the consumer. What role do the costs play in all of this? Is it an equilibrium? When does the fallacy start and normal 'crap product' cycle end?
I've never seen any explanation of this alleged fallacy that answers any of these questions.
> I've heard that many producers of goods deliberately introduce failure points
There are a lot of apocryphal claims like this, but little evidence. Most manufacturers design for an expected life of the product, and making it last longer than that is a waste of money and resources.
For example, you could design a computer to last for 20 years, but what would be the point? Computers go hopelessly obsolete in about 5 years. The only people who care about longevity of it are a handful of collectors. Fashionable clothing is not made to last because people don't wear out-of-fashion clothes. It's pointless to make them to last. Cars are designed to last for 10 years. Airliners are designed to last for 65,000 flight hours.
Products that are useful long term are usually made to last, like tools.
> Products that are useful long term are usually made to last, like tools.
Except they rarely are nowadays either. Lightbulbs would be a common example, but so would be cheap construction tools, kitchen tools, knives, etc. all designed to last for few uses and then break, so that people buy a replacement. The argument of "waste of money and resources" only holds for a single company, but not for the economy as a whole - it doesn't factor in the costs (and energy waste) of replacement and of dealing with the garbage, nor does it factor in the ecological damage created by unnecessary manufacturing.
It all boils down to the standard short-term, greedy optimization (in algorithmic sense) of the market economy, giving you perfectly legitimately sounding reasons to keep being stuck in a crappy local minimum.
Any wrench or hammer or saw you happen to buy will easily last you a lifetime, even if you use it constantly. I've seen some really cheap silverware (stamped out of sheet metal, and practically unusable) and some shoddy knives, but spend even a few dollars more and you can easily find something that will last for many years. The inexpensive silverware I picked up at Target a few years ago is solid cast stainless steel, and I have no doubts that it will last a lifetime; I doubt I could break a tine without tools. A cheap cast-iron skillet can easily last multiple centuries.
Most furniture is actually pretty shoddy, made from MDF and glue, but even so I've managed to find some that I'm happy with. My first office chair was not very good, and failed catastrophically in a few years, which was annoying. I managed to replace it with a much nicer one that I trust to last for decades. (It was rather overpriced though; I won't break even for something like 50 years. On the other hand, I can sit in it all day without hurting my back, which is more important to me.)
I have 8 year old computers that are perfectly good (aside from a hard drive that had to be replaced a year ago, and a new power supply the year before that), a 5 year old laptop that does all I could ask, etc. Computers are no longer advancing at such a breakneck pace that they're obsolete in a year, and the operating systems no longer have a lifetime measured in years either. I expect them all to last quite a bit longer.
I'm sure my washing machine will fail in a decade or two, probably the motor will burn out or a capacitor in the digital timer will fail. Neither are impossible to fix; the only question will be whether a newer washing machine would have enough extra efficiency to make replacement a better choice than repair.
Cars routinely last 200k miles or more, and replacement parts for most cars are easily had.
I would say that most products have a pretty good lifespan. Obviously my experience isn't universal, but I would say that most things are built well enough. It is worth paying attention to what you're buying, but most products are not actually intended to be disposable, except in areas of rapid technological change.
On the other hand, you could look at something like the jet turbine or transmission in an attack helicopter or tank. Those have a very definite lifetime, and a very strict maintenance schedule, and they're measured in hours, not years. If you do all the maintenance correctly, your jet turbine might last 500 hours (or some similar number, I'm not very familiar with the specifics) of use. Once you've used it that many carefully-logged hours you take it out and replace it with a new one. Maybe that's what you're thinking of? It's certainly expensive, but in military hardware you want to extract the maximum possible combat performance from everything; lifetime is pretty far down the priority list.
My reading of it: there's a continuum in production philosophy from throw-away culture to built-to-last products, and the broken-window fallacy (which Krugman, IIRC, doesn't think is a fallacy at all) is the extreme end of throw-away culture.
Building to last means high up-front costs, little flexibility (think of the Empire State Building and how much it must have cost to install air conditioning in it), but beautiful products with low total cost of ownership; throw-away goods are low on up-front costs, and they make it easy to respond to new technology, but they have a high total cost of ownership and they tend to be pretty ugly as well. A society which focuses on quality will be wealthier and more beautiful (look at Europe's low GDP and high standard of living), but one that's constantly rebuilding junk will be more equal; every 1970s Volvo still owned by an old-money family in 2016 is a Ford assembly-line worker without a job, or thereabouts...
Broken window fallacy is talking about the total (net) economy. It's perfectly possible for one person to come out ahead while the economy as a whole goes nowhere or even down.
For instance, if you are the only window repair person in town and you go around breaking other people's windows, you will certainly profit. But the amount you profit will be completely offset by the window owners' loss. (Presuming you do not go to jail, of course.)
Even if they are (which is apparently disputed), pointing out that someone is using a fallacy does not make them automatically wrong. Next time, you should try saying something more substantive than "Fallacy!"
Fallacy means faulty reasoning, not a false statement. It is possible to use faulty reasoning to arrive at a correct statement. For example, "The sun rises each day, because if it didn't then everyone would die." That's the fallacy of an appeal to consequences, yet the conclusion (the sun rises each day) is correct.
Furthermore there are other forms of reasoning than pure deduction. If you allow probabilistic inference, which is how humans generally operate intuitively, many deductive fallacies turn into probabilistic theorems.
I would guess they lost a lot less than the $200m initial investment, which included design & development of both the satelite and ground control systems. My assumption would be that only the satellite itself was destroyed in this explosion.
From the quote below, they reference $85 to cover launch, insurance, and 1 year of operating costs. Presumably that insurance would cover some of the costs of an event like this?
Spacecom Satellite Communications' (TASE:SCC) board of director has authorized management to sign a contract with Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. (IAI) (TASE: ARSP.B1) to build and buy the Amos 6 communications satellite for $200 million. IAI will build the satellite and its ground control systems, and will provide operating services. The company plans to launch the Amo6 in the first quarter of 2015, and its operating life will be at least 16 years.
Spacecom estimates that the cost of launching, insuring and one year's operation of the Amos 6 will be $85 million. The company has to pick a launch company. Spacecom said that it will seek financing for the Amos 6 from IAI and foreign sources.
I would be quite surprised if the payload was not insured. Doesn't make it any easier on the people who poured their lives into the effort, but the owner will not be out any substantial investment capitol; just potential earnings until its replacement can be pushed up.
One could also feel sad for the (possibly millions) of people in Africa who were depending on this satellite launch to give them internet service. The difference between having internet, and not having it, is huge, especially in the developing world. This has real human consequences.
On any project like that many engineers involved will have invested more than regular hours and pushed their work life balance - losing it all a couple of days from launch into space - that's harsh dude
Most of the stuff on which we engineers work ends up in the bin anyway. This is just more spectacular than some manager showing up one day to announce that this XXX M$ project, the one you and many others spent your last 2 years regularly overtiming, is cancelled because mblllmbllbllsometopmanagementfuckedupmbbllmbllblll. I just mention this case because it was the most ridiculous that happened to me but a large majority of others projects I've worked ended up in the bin a way or another, or should have because they are designed from scratch to be useless.
Knowing how smart and methodological Musk is, I wouldn't be surprised if the rule at the office is actually to leave your desk and go home at 5pm sharp.
You are prone to make more mistakes when you tired and overworked and I cannot imagine more important place not to make mistakes, than building a rocket.
We're just past the anniversary of the last mishap: http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/07/20/crs-7-investigation-up...
I also get the feeling that extra sleep and recovery time encourages the kind of creative thinking that recognizes unusual ways for things to go wrong and corrects for them in advance.
Wouldn't surprise me in the least. I know Musk claims that "working at Tesla/SpaceX is like being in the special forces", but there's no way that every employee at these companies has the work capacity to stay 100% focused through 80 hour work weeks all the time.
> Not only that, it's also not really a secret that SpaceX attracts people who want to enter the space industry. You get experience there, you move on.
Which is exactly the kind of people that SpaceX does not want and who should not apply there. The turnover is high for a reason indeed.
Not if you're covered by the "white collar exemption", which any engineer-type is going to fall under. Folks working 80 hour weeks at startups don't get any overtime for it.
Then again, you also have the payload manufacturer and other involved parties, which are not managed by Musk. Either way, a lot of hard work has gone up in flames, and people will be understandably disappointed.
Tell that to the people in Africa who will soon have no internet access once AMOS-2 fails.
This payload, AMOS-6, was a replacement for the soon to fail AMOS-2 which among other things is part of a Facebook initiative to provide internet access in parts of Africa.
I am not aware of any replacement in the works for it, so that service may just shut down, and who knows if it will ever start back up.
So while this might be "nothing" to you, it has actual repercussions for people.
Not to mention the effects on the Israeli company that made the payload. Insurance may or may not pay for the satellite itself (I don't know), but even if they do, they were also relying on income generated from running it.
Actual humans working for that company may now be impacted.
Internet.org was only a part of AMOS-6's planned internet bandwidth. Per Wikipedia "36 regional spotbeams with a throughput of about 18 Gbit/s — on Amos-6 to provide service for Facebook’s Internet.org and a new Eutelsat subsidiary focusing on African businesses. Costs would be divided in approximately equal shares between Eutelsat and Facebook."
It's a real bummer, also don't forget that now that SpaceX has had two payload losses in two years will mean that their insurance is very likely to go up.
Agree. "Sad" is the PC thing to say when something like that happens. In most people's lives it's a big "who cares". [1]
The fact that you were downvoted (at least when I saw your comment) indicates people don't agree with what you are saying and is an example of trying to enforce a particular type of thinking on someone else as far as what they should think or feel.
[1] Of course I wouldn't say "who cares" directly to someone involved in the project in some way then you extend your condolences.
You wouldn't say it directly to someone involved in the project, but you'll say it in a public forum where there's a decent chance some of those people will see it?
Of course I would say it to someone directly involved in the project. I've had projects I worked on go south through unavoidable externalities, of course I felt disappointed but there' no irreversible loss as when someone dies or is permanently disabled. Save your emotions for things that actually matter, an economic/operational setback doesn't qualify.
Exactly. That is the problem with the entire PC thing. You have to walk around on eggshells being worried that you will offend someone and never say what you think. I mean seriously. Be worried that someone who worked on a rocket project for SpaceX might be offended by what I say? I am supposed to not say anything because of that?
There's nothing wrong with softening your language a bit just in case someone who happens to be involved sees what you write. If not being a jerk means you can't speak what's on your mind, then that says more about your mind than it does the world.
Why is it necessary to feel sad and to even consider all of that? That is my point. What bothers you bothers you and what doesn't is fine, less to think about. You can't go around being bothered by everything 'bad' that happens in the world to someone else. I don't think that is healthy in any way. By "bothered" I don't mean indicating in words that something is sad. I mean actual concern as if it impacts you or someone you know personally.
Sorry but I can't relate to this type of tragedy at all. I can relate to someone getting hacked and losing their business or customer information though. That pain I can imagine. And to hear someone say to me "that's sad" about the latter when knowing they don't have any idea what it is really like to me is just lip service and almost patronizing.
Hey, why are you letting this bother you so much? Don't let what bothers other people bother you, I don't think it's healthy to want so much control over other people's emotions, and surely you'd have less to think about it you stopped letting it bother you so much?
This was a major part of a charitable initiative to bring free internet access to Africa.. That's a lot of lost opportunity for business, education, health care..
From a technical perspective, the laser-based communications network being developed by FB for Africa is super cool. I'm sad to see this delayed. Even though it doesn't affect me directly, it hits my inner nerd right in the feels.
Insurance. People don't spend tens of millions of $ sticking electronics on top of giant fireworks tubes without hedging the risks involved. If this is getting you int he feelz then you need to get out a bit more, this is merely a hiccup.
Sure, it will delay some things in Africa, but we can't easily say whether that delay will be good or bad. For all we know people will be better off due to the delay as it may be less disruptive of existing economic structures, notwithstanding their long-term inefficiency. You're assuming incorrectly that the consequences of this satellite deployment would have been all upside and no downside, but such effects are not reliably quantifiable.
