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> It's not a great comparison to Apollo anyway, as most of the cost of the F35 program will be spread over decades of maintaining the planes, Apollo's cost was
by jonknee 9y ago
> It's not a great comparison to Apollo anyway, as most of the cost of the F35 program will be spread over decades of maintaining the planes, Apollo's cost was far more concentrated to a short period of time.
FWIW the $400b figure is to buy the planes, the Pentagon estimates a further $1 trillion to maintain them.
- adventured 9y agoI understand. I'm saying that will never occur. They're not going to ever actually buy all of those planes, and the maintenance cost will be far lower accordingly. All you have to do is look at the F22 program to understand what's actually going to happen; there are numerous other recent examples of how they tend to slash & burn on ordering however. Ten years out they'll be on to the new new thing, and they'll be slashing the purchase program toward zero accordingly. The planes are costing $93 million per unit currently, they'll buy less than 500-600 of them across all branches of the military, that's ~$60 billion, give or take $10-$15 billion on cost inflation over 10 years. Then reduce the maintenance cost accordingly for that number versus the laughable former numbers (thousands? ha ha ha).