3 ms·
Probably 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
by munk-a 3y ago
Probably 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]