Wow, I had no idea it was that much.
Sorry for the naive question, but any ideas on why it costs so much? Wouldn't putting 100-200 top engineers on it for a few years be enough? What do they need 300 million for?
Sorry for the naive question, but any ideas on why it costs so much? Wouldn't putting 100-200 top engineers on it for a few years be enough? What do they need 300 million for?
This build-test-debug loop costs millions and may take months or years, and a single spectacular failure can sink the entire project (e.g. DC-X).
Most engineering is not like software! For example, most of the cost of a bridge is not the civil engineering to design the structure...
Not just that, but original R&D is much more expensive than implementation of proven designs. Not knowing which designs will work, or whether the overall idea will even work at all, greatly increases the number of design/build/test/debug cycles needed to build a product.
To maybe put that in perspective, $100 million a year is the budget of one of the smaller F1 teams.