Re:Greg Robinson fixed NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, re...
by WalterBright on Friday July 15, 2022 @04:36PM
(#32112520)
When I worked in engineering at Boeing, the cost of a forged part was the cost of the tool&die machinist making the die. The incremental cost of doing the actual forging was a rounding error. The dies do wear, and the parts get larger and larger until they're out of spec and a new die is sunk.
Those are the ignorant ones.
It isn't quite a "Those who know don't speak and those who speak don't know" situation, but this is just blindingly obvious to anyone who has done any R&D to manufacturing and risk assessment. Heck, even just having a duplicate on the ground to debug could save the mission (since there isn't one, let's hope it doesn't come to that).
On one-off projects of any size, the design, prototyping, testing, & refining the design just overwhelm the cost of fabricating the final parts — and they do it by orders of magnitude. Just for the carbon fiber parts I work in daily, the initial R&D test program for a sizeable (scale of 1 m^2) part might cost $25K, the first mold $12K, the first part sells for $3K, the second part $2K and the fifth part 1.7K. To get to volume production in the 100s, there's probably another dev program & set of molds, and the 300th part out the door might sell at $1200.