Many new players have been trying to enter the space launch industry in the past decade and with the development of new rockets comes an inevitable increase in expensive fireworks.
Now a question I heard a couple of times especially after the Virgin Orbit bankruptcy or the three Starship flights “failing” is basically “but is it even worth it?” (the level of progress between each Starship flight is so huge that defining these as failures is a bit harsh to be fair)
I mean when you think about it rockets are very expensive pieces of hardware (one Starship launch is in the range of 10 million $) and are some of the most complex systems to develop to this day.
We’re spending a tremendous amount of effort and money on these things but we know that there is a pretty high risk of them blowing up so:
- Is it really worth that investment and the risk?
- How often are rockets really failing?
The only way up
If you’ve read this previous article: Your daily satellites routine; you’re now aware of how important space has become.
Related Post
Satellites have more than crossed the line separating the “good to have” from the “critical infrastructure” and reaching space is only getting more and more important with time not just for extraterrestrial exploration (which is what many people first think about) but for direct on Earth benefit.
And as you can guess the only way up there is…. well rockets (mindbowing). But not just any rockets, satellites come in different shapes and sizes, they do not target the same orbits depending on their missions and they obviously are not manufactured, operated and launched by the same countries.
This very simply means that depending on what you want your satellite to do you’re not going to talk to the same Launcher company. You want a launcher that gives a good price for your satellites size and mass, that can send it to the right orbit, that preferably launches from your country if your satellite has some form of strategic importance (military, or even economic preferences).
And the fact is that today the space industry is growing very fast (as Deloitte have pointed out here). The demand for space data is constantly increasing; which means we need more satellites in space and therefore, you guessed it, we need more rockets.
Short version is: rockets are not a luxury anymore, they’re a need.
Fireworks
There is sometimes a misconception regarding failure rates in the rockets world but as on pretty much any topic that is ever reported by the media one tends to hear much more about the bad than the good.
You might have heard of Virgin Orbit’s “first UK space launch” ending in a quite disappointing fail that ultimately led to the company filing for bankruptcy. You most probably saw at least an image of a Starship or a Falcon 9 test blowing up. And if you’re really up to date you might have seen the Japanese KAIROS attempting its first flight until it explodes right after the leaving the pad.
All these cases sometimes give the feeling that rockets fail often but one parameter to consider is that in the past few years there are many new rockets being developed. This simply means that the number of first and second flights is quite high which ultimately means more frequent failures.
The real failure rate of rockets is actually closer to 4% or one in every 25 flights (see here) which is much lower than what people seem to think.
The first flights usually tend to have a very high failure rate for quite simple reasons. A rocket is complicated and despite the engineers best efforts to build everything perfectly it often takes just one or two unknown parameters in one subsystem to terminate the entire mission.
A research conducted by the Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany estimated that in the past 15 years approximately 54% of rocket fails were caused by the engines not working properly, 18% for the guidance and attitude correction systems and another 18% for the separation mechanisms.
And these are only some of the systems that could not function properly in such a system so it usually takes some time and experimenting for engineers to get it right and to know where problems are likely to happen in their specific case to prevent them.
But overall established rockets can have very high reliabilities. Ariane 5 for example displayed a brilliant 96% success rate for 20 years of career and 117 launches.
Conclusion
Developing rockets is a tough endeavour and yes there is a technical and a financial risk to it. But it is simply a necessity for any organisation or country that wishes to have access to that increasingly strategic earth orbit.
No access to space means being dependent on others to reach orbit. Developing launchers is a difficult and long process and as time passes and as the strategic targets get further and further away from us any one who hasn’t invested today in space transportation will struggle to catch up.
