5 ms·
Tool bag “valued at $100,000”? What could possibly be in there?
by p1esk 3y ago
Tool bag “valued at $100,000”? What could possibly be in there?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- munk-a 3y agoProbably just regular stuff but of a high enough quality that we'd consider sending it to space? Defense and space equipment procurement is usually a lot more expensive than normal because 1) companies exploit the bidding system 2) you really don't want a screw driver that fails when you're re-attaching a solar panel to something floating in LEO since the run to the local Lowe's is going to be quite expensive.
- GauntletWizard 3y agoNot to mention that the mere act of sending it to space costs $30,000 per pound of payload, so it was probably $10k of quality tools totaling 3lbs of weight.
- kolinko 3y agoAlso, it may include a cost of shipping to orbit.
- kube-system 3y agoAnd also, a lot of it is low volume stuff, and fixed costs in manufacturing are huge. The reason the tools you buy at the home improvement store are cheap is because the fixed costs are spread out over thousands to millions of units. Design/labor/fixturing/tooling/etc can be brutal for low volumes. If you want to build a single Lego, the tooling could cost you hundreds of thousand of dollars.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoYou think a Lego piece is expensive, you should see the total capital outlay required to make an apple pie from scratch!
- em-bee 3y agodetails on the apple pie here: https://recursiverecipes.schollz.com/recipe/apple-pie?amount=1&timelimit=4210382&ingredientsToBuild= https://recursiverecipes.schollz.com/recipe/apple-pie?amount... discussion of that site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37885636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37885636
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoStore-bought soil?! Granny Sagan would have conniptions!
- kridsdale3 3y agoOne iPhone 16 is Five Billion Dollars. 50 million iPhones 16 can be made for $200 each.
- ericbarrett 3y agoThere's an old "just so" story that still pops up from time to time about how US astronauts found that normal ball point pens don't work without gravity, so NASA spent $bignum to have a contractor develop a "space pen." But the Russians used a pencil! Haha, look at these inefficient US government programs! Except it turns out that (a) the US did originally use pencils; and (b) the last things you want floating around a space station is conductive, flammable grit. Like pencil graphite. SciAm story about this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
- kube-system 3y agoAnd also, NASA did not pay Fisher to develop the pen, he already did.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- khuey 3y agoGiven the cost of launching stuff into space anything you want to have up there is worth at least thousands of dollars per pound.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoEasy math: $100,000/$600 hammer 166.667 $600 hammers.
- jdminhbg 3y agoMaybe the value includes the cost of putting it in orbit.
- gosub100 3y agoeverything was probably made of solid titanium
- smegger001 3y agoProbably low weight high strength alloys and made to be easily griped by a spacesuits glove.
- jacquesm 3y agoTools that don't seize in a vacuum. Vacuum is a very rough place to work with tools because stuff tends to fuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_cementing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_cementing
- ReptileMan 3y agoThe cost of lifting it there is probably 90% of the cost of the sum.
- oooyay 3y agoYou're getting voted down but this is a pretty good question! I had a tool kit in the Marines that was a basic split case with DeWalt looking hand tools and a soldering kit in it. The thing cost somewhere on the order of $60k and replacing individual parts was often more expensive than the sum of the collection. I constantly had to inventory the thing every time I took it out and I'd never let anyone use my tools or leave them laying around. The reason is that military tools and parts are built according to a spec and often in batches. That spec has to be reaffirmed for every batch and is often specified within the item spec. There's pretty normal specs in there like size and thread count, but then there's other that require destructive testing like tensile strength, material composition, heat tolerance, etc... When you make a big order the price per unit is pretty cheap because one destroyed item per item in the collection is amortized across the rest of them. When you order a single one they make one plus one for each destructive test. One of the most memorable examples I can think of is that I operated a special truck in Afghanistan that cost ~$1.5M. In order to build and deploy that one truck they built 4 more including all internals and hit it with rockets, explosives, and bullets to durability test the configuration of the internals. In the end, one $1.5M truck is actually $7.5M in order to ensure the safety of everyone inside.
- nvader 3y agoFor this, I will refer you to the O-ring Theory of Economic Development https://www.jstor.org/stable/2118400 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2118400