[gunshigh]

You're missing the point. Lockheed and Boeing had initial failures when each company was started. It's not like Boeing put up rockets on day one without a problem.

Then, when each company approaches stability with their launches, they form a new alliance. That new alliance has "zero failures", but that's only because you ignore each company's original problem s.

[clintonb]

I see your point, but it's not exactly relevant. As a purchaser in need of putting a multi-million dollar satellite in space, I could not care less that your company had failures in its infancy. I want to see your most-recent results as evidence of your ability to put my satellite in space. Comparing SpaceX, and whatever its success rate is, to ULA, and it's 100% in 106 launches, is easy.

The string of 106 successful launches is what I'm looking at. Just because you're new to the market doesn't necessarily mean you get a pass on quality/success. This is especially true when we're talking about putting expensive objects, that took years to build, in space.

[soared]

> I could not care less that your company had failures in its infancy

> Just because you're new to the market doesn't necessarily mean you get a pass on quality/success

Contradiction?

[dogma1138]

No it's not. When SpaceX gets to 100 launches with no failures you could effectively reset their counter if you want.

ULA has currently 100% in orbit mission success rate which cannot be overlooked.

Now for some it might not be an issue considering SpaceX is considerably cheaper, but if you are putting a new spy satellite into orbit your risk metrics might be different.

[soared]

What I meant was if you're willing to allow failure in a company's infancy, doesn't that mean they /do/ get a pass on quality/success?

[mockery]

The key point is that you're evaluating both companies TODAY, and they're at different points in their evolution. The fact that ULA/etc. had failures in their infancy is fairly irrelevant because that's the distant past - the fact that SpaceX had failures in its infancy is highly relevant because they're still IN their infancy.

The "pass" on quality/success is for things that happened in the distant past because they're less relevant to current performance, not some strange pass for anything that happens "during infancy" regardless of when that was.

[thomasahle]

Probably we can all agree, if we just say "30 launch strike" instead of "100% track record". The former is still impressive, whereas the second is a bit deceiving.

[blackoil]

When predicting reliability of next launch, you'll use weighted mean of historical data, not simple mean. And, weight of launches in 60s would be near 0, same for n-100 launches.