9 thoughts on “Launch Indemnification”

  2. If these are real companies, they should be able to handle their own risks,
    either with insurance or writing checks when they fail.

    The taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook forever.

    The greatest failing of Nuclear Power is it depends upon Price-Anderson, subsidies for
    insurance. The operators and manufacturers can’t insure their own risks.

    1. Some accidents can’t be privately insured against because no insurance company is big enough to cover the losses, or willing, however remote the odds might be. No company is going to sell you a $10 billion dollar insurance policy covering a single accident because they couldn’t take the hit, either. There’s not an infinite pile of money laying around out there.

      2. It has nothing to do with efficiency, it has to do with size and risk. The biggest risk is the destruction of the net worth of the entire planet, so to properly cover such an event the insurance company would have to have assets equal to the net worth of the entire planet, but in that case the entire planet’s net worth is just the insurance company. But if the planet’s entire net worth is the insurance company, there’s no other money or assets with which to pay the insurance premium. Also, if the entire planet got wiped out, so did the insurance company, along with its assets, so it couldn’t actually pay out anything anyway.

        Scale that back some, and the problem persists. Suppose you launch a rocket and it slams into the Superbowl at Mach 3 and kills 100,000 football fans, and the insurance company is on the hook for $10 million per fried fan, or $1 trillion dollars. Given a market with multiple insurance companies, this implies that they should all have a trillion dollars in assets sitting around, awaiting the day that a rocket goes awry in a billion to one unlikely event. I don’t think Allstate or Progressive has a trillion dollars sitting around, so they couldn’t write such a policy. Nor would we want most of the country’s net worth held, and thus controlled, by insurance companies, the very people Obama constantly rails against as being evil and greedy.

        1. So when a problem is too big, you are perfectly happy with the Taxpayers and Government
          fixing it?

          So when the largest risk for a space launch is a billion dollars, you think the
          government should intervene and resolve that problem?

          1. Today we are reminded that dn-guy is unaware of the fallacy of the excluded middle (among many other things.)

  3. Have you never heard of a milker bill?

    This is nothing compared to the “learning period” memorandum or the threats to put suborbital tourism vehicles on the ITAR list.

    The message from Congress is clear: send money.

  4. I hope Mr. Muncy will pardon me, since I have no first hand knowledge of the man and thus no way of knowing whether he is prone to exaggeration for effect, but I do believe his interpretation of the risk is overstated. The government requires the launch company to carry enough insurance to cover a single occurrence of an event whose probability is 1×10-7. Such an event should be termed improbable. It is 15 times less likely than the probability of being dealt a royal flush on one five-card deal from a 52 card deck. Unlike the poker hand deal, however, the launch (with today’s technology) is a single, unrepeatable event — not part of an ensemble of a large number of identical events, such as poker deals or dice throws, having a random but finite set of outcomes. The Bernoulli trial approach does not apply to today’s space launches, and probably won’t be in my lifetime. The most likely outcome is that there will never be an accident of this type no matter how many launches happen.

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