[mirashii]

Even on the cheap end of estimates at 250k/each, that's still 10 million in hardware alone, not to mention launch costs, opportunity cost of delaying operations, etc.

But really, that's neither here nor there, the point of the comment is that a combination of an unexpected solar storm and the operations procedures followed for dealing with them lead to a possibly unnecessary loss of satellites. Just because they have more doesn't mean they're happy about losing out on millions of dollars of hardware.

[daniel-cussen]

10 million USD is an acceptable loss at that scale against other tradeoffs. Launch costs are low, so plus these sats aren't as expensively made because their supremacy (meaning their height off the ground here, that's my intent with that word) does not cost their weight in gold.

Same as Tesla crashes versus speed versus manufacturing cost, versus everything, tradeoffs. Are they justified or not?