There's more to failures than monetary costs - reputation loss, as ack wrote, and there's no insurance against that.

I'm not into space stuff whatsoever, but recently I've been working for a manufacturer of satellite equipment. They produce amongst other things power amplifiers for satellite emitters - those beasts that produce 400W worth of transmission energy.

They explained to me that whilst most if not all satellite components are redundant and connections can be routed inside the satellite to overcome an outage, their equipment must perform 100%. Not because of monetary failure costs - they have insurances anyways, I guess - but because of the reputation loss it would mean if a newspaper ran the line "Satellite outage due to power amplifier failure produced by company XY". They could look for other things to produce, then...

--shmem 

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

In reply to Re^2: "Practices and Principles" to death by shmem
in thread "Practices and Principles" to death by ack

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