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SpaceX ran into this issue too. Off the shelf parts are rare and prohibitively expensive. Musk's biography goes into this a bit:

"But how do you know if a $5,000 radio designed in-house is going to work against the tried-and-true legacy parts? How do you build the entire rocket's avionics computer system for just over $10,000, when standard rocket companies use systems that cost in the neighborhood of $10 million?

Well, you test both of them on the same flight. While we've been watching SpaceX try to land a rocket on a boat, Vance notes that the company has been performing dozens of experiments in secret. It'll load a rocket with both the legacy part and the one it's designed in house, and test them both without making a big deal out of it."

2 comments

A bit unrelated but I've been told biohacklabs reimplemented lab/med equipement for a hundredth (even a thousandth) of the price. Not 2015 state of art, but still usable.

Free market has blind spots.

Typically biohacklabs don't value their own time in the same way engineers at a company will.

Here [1] is a picture of a thermocycler, it probably took dozens of people to develop and I doubt more than 100 of the particular model are sold. On the other hand, it operates in same way as a rice cooker.

Lets do some math, it costs 1,000,000 per year to maintain the team of engineers that builds these things. They sell about 100 a year, so each one needs to sell at 10,000 just to pay for labor.

The feeling of outrage comes from the low cost cost of consumer goods. The thing is that many consumer goods (such as an electric can opener) are built at both large scales and low engineering investment - perhaps exploiting comparably cheap labor and lax patent laws in Asian. We might find that the initial engineering investment (perhaps done in the 1950s) was non-trivial, yet we aren't paying for it today.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/G-Storm_...

It could be an issue of not legally being allowed to sell it cheaper, e.g. some bio/pharma company owns the patent on the tech, and chooses to sell it for $100,000, then the fact that some hackers can rip off the patent for $100 is irrelevant of the free market because they can't sell it, and any large operation would immediately face lawsuits from the patentholder if they tried to do the same thing.

> Free market has blind spots.

Not sure this is blind spots so much as regulation. You can built it for far less, but you can't get it approved as safe.

> You can built it for far less, but you can't get it approved as safe

You can build anything for less. Safety isn't a regulation issue, it's an issue of harming human beings. I'm very glad for those regulations.

We need to bring pain back. Humanity has become soft in most first world countries. Eliminating pain is big, big problem.

For medical devices yes, but for research instruments there aren't major hurdles. You can even build instruments for medical research with virtual no certification.

> you test both of them on the same flight

That seems too simple to me. Can they afford to test enough rockets to empirically validate an acceptable failure rate for high-reliability components? If it should fail 1/500 flights, for example, how could they validate that in testing?

ULA has over 100 launches without failure; SpaceX's record is around 19 out of 20. My understanding is that SpaceX will need to reach ULA's level of reliability to succeed, especially to launch humans.

How did they test the $10 million dollar system empirically? Did they send it on 500 missions before it was certified? The first mission has to start somewhere at some price... SpaceX will get there...

ULA is triple the cost of SpaceX and they have an $800 million rider with the DOD for "at moments notice" launch. That makes them almost quadruple the price SpaceX. [1]

[1]https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/ula-executive-admits...

> How did they test the $10 million dollar system empirically? Did they send it on 500 missions before it was certified?

My point is that there are other methods of assurance; one of them is additional investment in reliability, something SpaceX is trying to avoid.

> ULA is triple the cost of SpaceX ...

Perhaps that's how much sufficient reliability costs. In much of engineering, and at least in IT, high-reliability is one of the most expensive requirements. As a simple example, compare the cost of an unreliable consumer ISP service ($30/month for maybe 15 Mbps?) and a reliable T1 circuit ($300/month for maybe 1.4 Mbps?) - you pay 10x for 1/10th the speed.

From my seat in the bleachers, it will be interesting to see if SpaceX can deliver high reliability for significantly less than ULA. Good for them and for everyone if they pull it off.