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<blockquote data-quote="Olgar Shiverstone" data-source="post: 6114145" data-attributes="member: 5868">Fact check: Procurement costs for the B-2 were just under $1B per bomber, with total cost at about $2.1B per aircraft when development costs are included (compared to $2.5B for the Mars Science Laboratory program -- Curiosity).&nbsp; This was a result of the reduction in total buy from 132 to 21, which meant that the R&amp;D and production tooling designed to build over 100 aircraft have to be spread over just 21 -- a lesson that carries over to this discussion on space travel, because if you can increase production volumes beyond one-offs, the average procurement cost declines substantially.This suggests too that repeat MSL missions, provided they don't vary much from the current design of Curisoity, would come down in cost as the preliminary development is completed (though numbers would have to increase substantially as build and test of single spacecraft is still expensive and have never reached mass-production proportions).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Olgar Shiverstone, post: 6114145, member: 5868"] Fact check: Procurement costs for the B-2 were just under $1B per bomber, with total cost at about $2.1B per aircraft when development costs are included (compared to $2.5B for the Mars Science Laboratory program -- Curiosity). This was a result of the reduction in total buy from 132 to 21, which meant that the R&D and production tooling designed to build over 100 aircraft have to be spread over just 21 -- a lesson that carries over to this discussion on space travel, because if you can increase production volumes beyond one-offs, the average procurement cost declines substantially. This suggests too that repeat MSL missions, provided they don't vary much from the current design of Curisoity, would come down in cost as the preliminary development is completed (though numbers would have to increase substantially as build and test of single spacecraft is still expensive and have never reached mass-production proportions). [/QUOTE]

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