Boom SST, faster than Concorde

[Equus]

Mave said:

It's puerile to post costs as evidence of your assertion when you won't discuss what's I'm those costs.

What is in those costs is the total development and certification of the vehicle.

It's puerile to ask for those costs to be split down to a level that you know damn well comes down to pure hypothesis.

How can you say what part of the cost of certification is only associated with the whole vehicle, when that whole vehicle is made up of certified parts... take the parts (and their certification) away, and you have no vehicle. There is no 'MOT' test when the whole vehicle is certified/type approved in one go.There are a large number of tests and assessments, most at component level, a few (like crash and emissions testing) of the whole vehicle; but passing the latter on their own won't gain you a type approval.

These are nonsensical, deliberately vexatious questions.

[Talksteer]

Frik said:

Equus said:

Frik said:

The major cost in developing aircraft is certification. Cars and spaceships don't require nearly as much paperwork.

Cars arguably require a lot more, if you are intending to compete in global markets - there is nothing like the consistency of legislation, with each country often having its own, quite different standards and testing. Even within the EU there remains some inconsistency, never mind when you start looking further afield.

Aircraft are, by their very nature, a 'global' product, so the legislation has developed in a way that reflects this.

In terms of legislation and certification, spaceships are just aircraft that go further.

You can argue it, but it simply isn't the case. This is why aircraft development programmes are substantially longer than for cars.

Having actually designed jet engines and having colleagues who previously worked in automotive I can conclusively say the certification requirements for anything associated with commercial aircraft are miles harder.

Automotive regulations are a bunch of minimum standards that pretty much design your components for you or you buy from a supplier that warrants that they do.

Aerospace regulations simply demand that every single component be designed, analysed and tested to demonstrate a level of reliability commensurate with the components position in a fault tree. The regulations won't tell you how to do this, you have to develop your own methods and then educate the regulator as to why they are suitable.

In cars the type approval authorities don't give a stuff about 95% of the car. You can design it on the basis of previous precedent or to whatever standard you like.

You can test your car as much as you like, where you like, aerospace regulations make getting your prototype in the air very costly and time consuming.

Oh and while you're at it get the performance within 1% of what you estimated five years ago.

The fact that Lotus's are type approved should be indicative of cost and difficulty of doing this.

Rockets have to last ten minutes in service, and not blow up more than one in twenty flights. The certification requirements for commercial space flight are relatively rudimentary and rockets are much less complex than commercial airliners. SpaceX has not yet man rated any of their boosters.

[Mave]

Equus said:

Mave said:

It's puerile to post costs as evidence of your assertion when you won't discuss what's I'm those costs.

What is in those costs is the total development and certification of the vehicle.

It's puerile to ask for those costs to be split down to a level that you know damn well comes down to pure hypothesis.

How can you say what part of the cost of certification is only associated with the whole vehicle, when that whole vehicle is made up of certified parts... take the parts (and their certification) away, and you have no vehicle. There is no 'MOT' test when the whole vehicle is certified/type approved in one go.There are a large number of tests and assessments, most at component level, a few (like crash and emissions testing) of the whole vehicle; but passing the latter on their own won't gain you a type approval.

These are nonsensical, deliberately vexatious questions.

You are the one who introduced and recommended the concept of breaking out component certification to suppliers, not me.

And "development" and "certification" can mean different things to different people. The costs you quoted for the A380 for example (which incidentally I suspect you meant $25B rather than $13B) are most definitely not all certification costs; so comparing $25B (or $13B) for an A380 with $6B for a car is meaningless in the context of comparing certification costs.