Re: Good thinking that man
So in that case all the buildings must be fully allocated to the first engine, and all the other engines get a free ride?
When do you stop amortising, or rather when do you plan to stop amortising.
If you intend to produce a million of something then you don't say after 100 that 1% of the tooling costs are attributed to each thing.
The rest of the stack *is* mostly stainless steel - perfectly capable of holding both oxygen and methane at cryogenic temperatures (just one reason they aren't using hydrogen).
Yes there are ancillaries, but the turbo pumps are part of the engine. There are a handful of pressure tanks, and plumbing - but the vast majority of the stack is two massive propellant tanks - You might have missed that I allocated ~$10m to the "rest" of the rocket, not alot of that is taken up by steel costs.
Yes - Musk is a natural optimist, but by aiming for ambitious goals, even if he falls short he's still ended up with more progress than others.
However since the prototypes of the raptor 1 were under $1m four years ago... I don't think the final price per engine (remember the simplified design of the R2, and the focus on design for manufacture) will be $2.5m - It might end up at $300k rather than 250... but that's still substantially less the $100m for the RS25e
"NASA announced May 1 it had awarded a contract to Aerojet valued at $1.79 billion to produce 18 RS-25 engines."