To be fair, if Elon worked in the project for 40 - 80 hours a week, he probably could get a team to accomplish it at 1/8th the cost or lower.
Consider he did this with rockets, getting them to under 1/10th the cost
Consider he did this with rockets, getting them to under 1/10th the cost
Comparisons with non-domestic rockets are complicated by state subsidies and differentials in labor costs. But the Falcon 9 is approaching the 10X mark even before reusability has been priced in. Both the Falcon Heavy (in a few months) and the (eventual) reusable pricing should overshoot the 10X mark substantially.
[1] I went to rocketbuilder.com and both LEO configurations I tried were around $8,000/kg (and I didn't count the 20% deduction for "ULA added value" since the numbers there are debatable)
The GAO cites $164M/launch as the price for the cheapest Delta V[3] (is there some kind of threshold at $165M?), which when the Falcon 9 was introduced could put 8,500kg to LEO[4], or $19,294/kg. (It has since been uprated and gotten slightly cheaper).
Must've screwed up my calculations earlier, because those aren't tallying. Anyhow, as you can see, SpaceX is already around 7x cheaper compared to where ULA was, and should cross the 10x threshold shortly. Nice to see ULA responding to competitive pressure, however!
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20160324172526/http://www.ulalau...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V
IMHO he'll be well over 1/10 the cost before he finishes the thousands of land deals he would need for this, even if he somehow got permission to build it over the highway.
Hence the boring company.
Tunneling gets cheaper due to <...>? I would be interested.
I guess the Swiss would be interested too.
Salient points:
"If you just do two things you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and then go beyond that. The first thing to do is cut the tunnel diameter by 2 times or more. A single road tunnel has to be 26 to 28 feet in diameter to allow for crashes and emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars.
But if you shrunk it to 12 feet, what we're attempting, which is plenty for a skate to get through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of 4. The tunnel costs scales with the cross-sectional area. That's roughly half an order of magnitude improvement right there.
Then, tunneling machines tunnel half time and then stop and the rest of the time is reinforcements for the tunnel walls. If you design the machine to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that, and it's a factor of 8. Also these machines are far from being at their power or thermal limit. I think you can get a factor of two, maybe even four or five on top of that.
There’s a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess of an order of magnitude improvement in cost per mile. Our target actually is that we have pet snail named Gary from....Sponge Bob Square Pants. Gary is capable of going 14 times faster than a tunnel boring machine. We want to beat Gary."