The thread for space cadets!

[Borachio]

Strewth, you two seem to have calmed down a lot.

What happened? Did sanity break out?

Whoa! I'm not knocking it, you understand.

 

[timtofly]

When idiots stop waiving stuff around, they look like the normal person they actually are?

 

[Thorgalaeg]

While I'm by no means an expert at economics, I think this is actually very telling; a Lambo doesn't cost nearly as much to make as what it's sold for, either in terms of effort or materiel; even an ultra-high end supercar is not going to cost generally more than $10,000 to put together. Most of the price is for the badge and prestige.

http://www.automechanicschools.net/blog/supercars-are-they-worth-it-for-companies-to-make/

Take for instance the Bugatti Veyron. It costs Bugatti’s parent company Volkswagen AG nearly $5 million to make one, but the company sells a Veyron for around $2.7 million. That’s a $2.3 million loss on each car, which doesn’t even consider the millions the company spent in car development.

 

[peter grimes]

While I'm by no means an expert at economics, I think this is actually very telling; a Lambo doesn't cost nearly as much to make as what it's sold for, either in terms of effort or materiel; even an ultra-high end supercar is not going to cost generally more than $10,000 to put together. Most of the price is for the badge and prestige. This applies to any given consumer product, whether it's Tide or a Cessna.

This is wrong - super cars, whether on the luxury end or performance end, utilize bespoke manufacturing processes and expensive materials. There is definitely a rarity premium built into the retail price, but it's nothing like 1000% as you claim. My guess is that it's closer to 30%. I could be wrong, but I'll defer to people who read extensively about supercars to correct me

*summoning Formaldehyde *

 

[timtofly]

Not to derail the thread any further on cars, but there is a difference in trying to make something unique and expensive and only tooling for a limited number of cars on purpose.

 

[Symphony D.]

Doing some deeper digging, it seems I was wrong, but also that the Veyron's costs are way out of wack for industry standards:

http://www.caw.ca/assets/pdf/590-Auto_Price.pdf
http://www.epa.gov/otaq/ld-hwy/420r09003.pdf
http://msl1.mit.edu/classes/esd123/vyas.pdf

It also seems like profit margin has gone down dramatically with time, though that's harder to substantiate in a cursory fashion.

My guess is that it's closer to 30%.

Porsche apparently manages 18.4%. So yeah, I was operating on bad information. Sure adds up though sales volume though.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Yes, but since you were speaking about ultra-high end supercars the Veyron is the most ultra-high end of all. Anyway most high-end supercars (or hypercars) are merely technological showcases and companies usually loss lots of money building them. (well, maybe they win with the publicity everything considered)

 

[Symphony D.]

Ironically Tide isn't that cheap either. Well then I guess the better car analogy would be to go from blowing millions on F-1 cars with no real tangible profit return toward things that have production costs at least somewhat in line with their MSRP; to go from the hypercar toward the family car.

e: or, when that's not possible, to make the "prestige" gained off the thing underwrite a loss on profit, at least initially, as with F-1, the Veyron, etc.

 

[Masada]

The article states that costs increased drastically with a slight drop in volume, yes.

So there are huge scale effects, cool.

The article also stated that part of the reason was because of excess components that had run out.

So if you build more components, average cost comes down. That sounds like a scale effect.

That, along with the factors I spoke on (namely an engine shortage, shuttered production plants, an aging workforce and general market instabilities) means that the increase of prices couldn't be entirely avoided and further,

So at some stage government did manage to put in large enough orders to reduce average unit costs i.e. to achieve scale. With us looking at the results now in the cost competitiveness of older components over new stuff.

that trying to increase volume beyond a certain point can in fact lead to an increase in unit cost. That's not how economies of scale typically work.

So at some point along the curve average cost rises. That's, well, a scale effect too (see graph). Although, again, this could be overcome if the government put in a large enough order sufficient to spread the costs of retooling, retraining etc across more units. So why is it that scale doesn't work in rocketry again?

Spoiler Graph :

 

[Borachio]

Ironically Tide isn't that cheap either.

I read this and I thought, 'What! Really? This is a joke, right?'

But no, it seems not.

 

[Winner]

I haven't read nearly all of the immense walls of texts of doom in the previous pages, but just a comment on the notion that "economies of scale" will make "rockets cheaper" and thus manned space exploration will kick off.

Maybe. However, there is currently no demand which would stimulate such development. Everybody is hyping what SpaceX does, but in the end they're simply rationalizing the existing space launch business, which is (as Zubrin himself pointed out) extraordinarily conservative.

More fundamentally, I believe the physics of conventional space launch makes it extremely unlikely any kind of "big dumb booster" + "mass production" would bring prices of space travel back to Earth (pun very much intended).

What's needed are completely new, smarter approaches to the problem. Like *cough Skylon *cough*.

 

[Masada]

Apparently there's huge scale effects as one moves from 26 to 23 units. That suggests that scale is a factor at current levels of production and that it does already help to significantly reduce costs. So I'm not really sure what's so pie in the sky about it? Really, there's not a huge difference between rockets and, well, any other big ticket military acquisitions project. Warships being large, and technically complicated, are probably the closest analogue and are well know to have huge scale effects acting on them.

 

[Symphony D.]

To that point: the CBO estimated in 1990 that the total program cost for 132 B-2 bombers would be $76.7 billion, or $581 million per bomber (in 1991 dollars). In 1997 dollars, this would be around $688.6 million per bomber; the actual total program cost for the 21 B-2s actually produced in 1997 dollars was $2.1 billion per bomber. For around 2x the cost, Congress could've bought 6x the bombers. (This has interesting implications for the constant reductions of F-22 and F-35 buys, but that's neither here nor there.)

Major aerospace items have absolutely horrendous cost-scaling. The previously cited evidence indicates it's no different for boosters, and I don't see any reason why it would be. Cost-savings of anywhere from a factor of 2 to 3 per purchased unit in extended production runs don't seem uncommon; that adds up tremendously over time. For something where you're doing continuous production (like boosters) instead of a limited run (like bombers), this is even worse due to the need to keep the plants, personnel, tools, etc., on hand and in working order instead of packing up the machinery for storage and reassigning the personnel (overhead and downtime become serious factors in costs). I would predict significantly larger cost savings for continuous production items by ramping up production.

Couple that with a competitive industry that isn't price-gouging its customers, and well... I can't tell you exactly how much money you'll be saving per unit capacity, but it'll be a helluva lot.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Someone is jealous of Tony Stark


Link to video.



Also, the ultimate spy satellite if they can get it to work.
Made out of plastic
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/12/giant-folding-satellite/

 

[LamaGT]

I haven't read nearly all of the immense walls of texts of doom in the previous pages, but just a comment on the notion that "economies of scale" will make "rockets cheaper" and thus manned space exploration will kick off.

Maybe. However, there is currently no demand which would stimulate such development. Everybody is hyping what SpaceX does, but in the end they're simply rationalizing the existing space launch business, which is (as Zubrin himself pointed out) extraordinarily conservative.

More fundamentally, I believe the physics of conventional space launch makes it extremely unlikely any kind of "big dumb booster" + "mass production" would bring prices of space travel back to Earth (pun very much intended).

What's needed are completely new, smarter approaches to the problem. Like *cough Skylon *cough*.

About Skylon, to me their ridiculously low development and production cost looks like something pulled completely out of their ass, do they have specific plans that would explain their low price? Perhaps that low cost implies huge volumes of them being manufactured?

 

[peter grimes]

Isn't the primary hurdle that Skylon needs to surpass is the engine itself? From what little I understand, it seems that the rest of the system is pretty much current-tech level engineering.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Video from the Juno probe as it flied by Earth in October earlier this year:

http://www.space.com/23913-earth-moon-starship-view-nasa-video.html

Speaks for itself, so get off your lazy asses and click the damn link and watch the video. You won't regret it.

 

[Winner]

About Skylon, to me their ridiculously low development and production cost looks like something pulled completely out of their ass, do they have specific plans that would explain their low price? Perhaps that low cost implies huge volumes of them being manufactured?

Low? Their projections speak roughly of ~10 billion €uros (roughly the development cost of Airbus A380, which is in many ways a lot more complicated machine) spread over 10 years of development. No pocket change. These projections were independently verified by ESA and a London Economics consultancy group, and criticized for being too pessimistic.

Now compare that with some of the "new space" proposals from the US, where people claim to achieve more for 1/10th of that cost.

Isn't the primary hurdle that Skylon needs to surpass is the engine itself? From what little I understand, it seems that the rest of the system is pretty much current-tech level engineering.

Yes, the SABRE engine is absolutely critical. It needs to operate within a few per cent margin of what is projected, otherwise the project makes no sense. That's why they have started with developing SABRE, or more precisely, the most critical component, the heat exchanger. That has now been proven to work, so now it's about producing the first engineering models of SABRE and from there, the first real prototypes of it.

The rest is pretty much straightforward. Not that there are no possible problematic spots, but the margins for mass growth in the hull are very generous. You'd have to absolutely botch it for it not to work.

 

[Cutlass]

While I'm by no means an expert at economics, I think this is actually very telling; a Lambo doesn't cost nearly as much to make as what it's sold for, either in terms of effort or materiel; even an ultra-high end supercar is not going to cost generally more than $10,000 to put together. Most of the price is for the badge and prestige. This applies to any given consumer product, whether it's Tide or a Cessna.

You couldn't put together a Ford Fusion for $10,000. And those have economies of scale never seen in sports cars. Much less supercars.

 

[Symphony D.]

Way to be late on a point that was already discussed, discarded, and moved on from.