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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

It took SpaceX $100m to create a space rocket, engines, launch facilities, a cargo capsule fit for human travel, and a VTOL rocket prototype. I can't even fathom how it is possible that a different model of car costs $200m to develop, except that there must be a lot of middlemen.

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A very good, low-cost, consumer electric car that can compete with gasoline cars and hybrids is a harder problem than putting cargo in orbit. It's also a harder problem than intercontinental fiber optic networks and supersonic flight. That's why we have all those things and still drive 1900s internal combustion engines around.

On the flip side, this shows us that space flight is not as hard as people commonly think it is, and that the reason it stagnated post-Apollo had more to do with NASA and the DOD's bureaucratic bumbling than with the inherent difficulty of it. Two things happened post-Apollo to hamstring space flight. One, Nixon cancelled the Saturn program and pushed the Shuttle, a stupid white elephant that ate up NASA's budget for 15+ years. Two, congress turned the space program into a pork program for influential districts, constantly moving goal-posts and creating and then scuttling programs to keep the pork flowing.

There is a lot of regulation. Almost every aspect of the design needs approval by the department of transport.

There is a need to ensure that the vehicles can be produced in mass production versus a one off. This includes quality control and specialised tooling for their production line. It might even include a new production line / facility.

I don't think it's middlemen increasing the cost.

Mass-production of anything cost-effectively at gigantic (100M+ units) scale is an engineering problem in and of itself, a whole other layer on top of the difficulty of designing the product in the first place. In some cases it's considerably harder.

My understanding was that the Model X is planned to be built on the same line as the Model S is currently being built on, they are currently building cars at a rate that works out to about 25,000/year, and they expect to be able to tweak the line to produce 100,000/year.

They will need some new tooling for the new Model X parts.

I'm pretty sure SpaceX spent much more than that. Wikipedia says they received $1 billion from 2002–2012.

Most of those years were spent creating technology and prototypes. Falcon 1 became commercial usable in 2009, Dragon in 2012, and as far as I know they are still working on the VTOL (or is it VTVL?) vehicle.

Really? How do you come up with the numbers for SpaceX? 100 million dollars sound like money from out of Elon Musk's pocket when he started SpaceX. Don't forget a lot of development is paid out by NASA.

cars are mass produced and highly regulated and are just as complex as rockets.

I don't know about the accuracy of those numbers, but I'd think that comparing the cost of building ONE rocket to the cost of building or expanding a plant to build cars at scale is not apples to apples.

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