Sea Launch lost a rocket and comsat today. Two losses out of twenty-four flights is only a 92% success rate. That kind of sucks for something that costs tens of millions, particularly when the payload also costs tens of millions. That’s not good news for the launch insurance business. It’s also not good news for Sea Launch’s schedule, even if they can figure out what happened quickly, if they have to do major repairs on the floating launch platform (of which they have only one–more fragility in the system).

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s more info. Exploded on the pad. Fortunately, no one was injured, but it’s hard to imagine how they won’t have to do some major repairs back in Long Beach.

We aren’t going to get reliable launch systems until we stop throwing the vehicles away, and fly a lot more.

[Wednesday morning update]

That didn’t take long. Here’s video.

[Update a few minutes later]

Hard to imagine that the platform is even salvageable. And it’s the only one they have. This is a huge disaster for Sea Launch–they could be out of business for a long time. And it’s bad for their customers as well, who will have to look for other rides if they want to hit their own service delivery schedules. This could be a setback for DirectTV HD, among others.

…until Space Access ’07. It should be an interesting meeting, with lots going on in both the orbital and suborbital world.

If you think you might want to attend, it would behoove you to make a hotel reservation today. You can always cancel.

On this week of anniversaries of space disasters, space historian Dwayne Day writes that we should display, rather than hide, the results of past tragedies, and allow not only NASA to learn from them, but the public as well. I agree.