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Hondas in Space
mikejz84 writes "Fast Company takes a look at SpaceX's attempt to challenge the high cost of space. This cost cutting philosophy includes buying equipment on eBay, looking to milk trucks for tank design ideas, and rummaging though junk yards. CEO Elon Musk remarks 'A Ferrari is a very expensive car. It is not reliable. But I would bet you 1,000-to-1 that if you bought a Honda Civic that that sucker will not break down in the first year of operation. You can have a cheap car that's reliable, and the same applies to rockets.'"
The analogy also sucks because cars are mass-produced by the millions. If they only ever built 20 Honda Civics, they would cost a lot more than they do. The cost of developing the design of the Honda Civic is known only to Honda, but I could easily imagine it approaching the price of a typical space system; especially if you factor in the cost of its predecessors whose designs it borrows from (since that borrowing is not nearly as easy to do in a space system which is not merely a yearly update of a previous model). Only by selling hundreds of thousands of cars does Honda recoup that cost.
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