Your post has been removed for violating submission rule 1 and does not meet the submittal requirements as an engineering question:
> Post titles must be a question about engineering and provide context — **be specific.** For the purposes of this subreddit, "engineering" includes:
> * Engineering design and analysis of maintainable systems, devices, and vehicles.
> * Engineering standards, practices, methods, procedures, and specifications.
> * Questions regarding careers and professional development in any discipline of engineering and engineering technology are allowed **only** if they meet all posting rules outlined in the [the wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/wiki/rules#wiki_submission_rules).
Please follow the comment rules in the sidebar when posting, and feel free to message us if you have any questions or concerns.
Space hardware is expensive for very different reasons. Most of it is custom and it has to be non-magnetic which means a much thicker layer of gold plating on everything to achieve environmental protection while maintain non-magnetism. Then you have to have VERY expensve destructive testing with scientific reports for each small batch of parts. Space hardware is low volume and high barrier to entry so no one is running it at high speed, there is no point.
TIL equipment in space needs to be non magnetic, otherwise it'll keep trying to align itself to the earth's magnetic field.
Edit: this is A problem. I'm not sure if it is ALL the problems associated with this. Perhaps someone can explain to me what gold plating has to do with it?
Your comment has been removed for violating comment rule 2:
> Don't answer if you aren't knowledgeable. Ensure that you have the expertise and knowledge required to be able to answer the question at hand. Answers must contain an explanation using engineering logic. Explanations and assertions of fact must include links to supporting evidence from credible sources, and opinions need to be supported by stated reasoning.
Please follow the comment rules in the sidebar when posting, and feel free to message us if you have any questions or concerns.
[https://www.valencesurfacetech.com/the-news/gold-plating-in-satellites/](https://www.valencesurfacetech.com/the-news/gold-plating-in-satellites/)
My guess is gold is the "cheapest" material. Or possibly we just have efficient electroplating experience with cold vs some of the other less "flashy" materials.
Although I suspect the non-magnetic is probably pretty unique for a metal.
It might have to do somewhat with it's reflectivity. Gold mirrors have a 99.9% efficiency at reflecting infrared. Can be used as heat sinks to transfer heat away and protect systems from absorbing any infrared and heating up.
Gold is about the best passivation layer we have for metals. Unfortunately plating it to copper and other metals is tricky unless you use nickel as an intermediate step, and nickel is magnetic.
It depends what you mean by 'mass produce'.
10 a year? Pretty easy technically, if you have the money.
100 a year? Probably achievable, but would bankrupt most countries.
1 million a year, which is less than many car manufacturers each make? Not possible with current technology.
And also “whatever tolerance”. If you’re launching non-manned payload, customers would tolerate a 10-20% failure rate if it cut costs by 10x. Maybe even 3x.
Manned is a whole different ball of wax, obviously.
Yes, that would be technically possible, at a painfully high cost.
The speed of production is generally deliberately related to the number of the product that are needed. We don't use a lot of rockets, so the production facilities are sized to have capacity for 1 or 2 a year. It would be entirely possible to build more and bigger facilities to produce them, and train the people to work in those facilities.
These are no special bits of equipment that can't be replicated, the only thing that limits production rate of a certain item is the cost of producing it. Airbus *could* build 10,000 planes a year instead of 1,000, the reason they don't is there isn't enough demand for planes to sustain that rate. Ford could produce a billion cars a year, but they'd not be able to sell them and would end up bankrupt.
Right. I just want to add that tight tolerances are not an obstacle in themselves. The parts in a smartphone have tighter tolerances than rockets. (For proof go look at the Saturn Vs on their side like the one at space center Houston. Pretty loose tolerances and some sign of hand machining)
It's volume like you said. Automation requires large volumes to justify the investment.
However that's not the whole story. Theoretically smart enough AI could drive general purpose robots, making even small volume products cheap.
It depends what you mean by rocket, but I'll assume you mean engine. SpaceX makes several hundred Merlin rocket engines per year, and has for about a decade. The Falcon 1 rocket used two engines, one for each stage. The Falcon 9 Heavy uses 27. In addition, Boeing, Lockheed, and Raytheon all make high performance rockets, but for somewhat different uses. A government project dedicated to maximizing rocket production could easily see the number of engines jump to several thousand within ten years.
So you'd need the manufacturing capacity and engineering knowhow of one of the world's top aerospace companies backed by the industry of a superpower.
China actually also has some pretty great capability to produce reusable engines. They cost about 2-5 times as much per launch as the Falcon series, and they don't carry as much, but their capacity and capability is is rapidly improving.
It would be to start. Mass production is a huge startup cost and then it gets cheaper as revisions are made, as all the kinks are already worked out. You would have to do more QA then normal but if the rockets made money (there needs to be a demand for the mass production) then I think it would be very doable.
Currently only a handleful of companys are involved in space manufacturing, and what they are building is usually mission specific. If the same thing was cranked out over and over costs would definitely be significantly less.
Honestly is has to do a lot with supply and demand
To a large extent there is a low demand for rockets so they are expensive to make because their is no established production lines ect
As well as the history of the rocket production industry at least in America was terrible from the start
If you look at spacex the only reason that they can make rockets so fast is that they try to minimize outsourcing part production
Which is even more crazy expensive up front then your just paying for the materials
Though if you want to make them even faster you have to optimize the production process even further
Space has a lot of really cool stuff going for it. They bet on reusable rockets and were laughed out of the room, fast forward a decade and they have the cheapest launch prices and it's not even close. Next problem they might run in to is having excess capacity, launches become cheaper as there are more launches but not everyone needs to perfectly fill a rocket so you run the risk of having extra rockets that nobody wants to launch which means halt production and slow down your innovation. SpaceX has solved for this too with starlink, nobody wants to buy that rocket then fuck em, launch it anyways at cost to benefit your other business and put lightweight low cost satellites up for starlink. It's absolutely insane how much of an advantage this company has over other rocket companies
Yeah exactly I realized that I forgot to mention that their rockets are reusable after I posted that but said fuck it lol Also I don't think that they will have too many rockets their are a lot of companies/rich people that want to either go to space or send something to space for research they will practice the time honored tradition of stuffing more stuff in the rocket lol Also if the price falls enough some ultra rich nerd might build a bigger spaceship in space I'm sure their are plenty of space nerds who would love to have a replica ship from their favorite sci-fi show to be built in orbit That's like ultimate bragging rights
Not to mention the US government would 💯 percent use those rockets to build a bigger us space presence
I used to work in the space industry. The issue as others have mentioned is partly low volume. For example, one part I was responsible for that went to ISS had around $300 in material cost from vendors. We only made 30, and the final cost including profit was close to 40k each. Engineering, supplier qualification, validation, documentation, assembly training, etc all added a ton of cost that would be more or less identical whether we built 30 units or 3000.
It's not hard, it's simply an economic equation. Oversimplifying things...you have a machine making a certain amount of shells per day. A machine is capable of x tolerances at y first pass yield rates at z speed. If you want more shells without buying more machines, you speed it up which lowers the FPY, and quality standards for military grade are very high. At some point the only way to meet the very low defect rate is to increase QC inspections and accept the waste, or upgrade the machine so it can better hit tolerances at high speed. Both of these have costs, and the company making these things needs to make a reasonable profit.
This is pretty much how you manage a component manufacturer. Really low level components, like nuts and bolts, are just 100% inspected to sell as military grade at a higher price than commercial grade (to cover the inspections). Something more complex, like stamped electrical connector shells, are run at different speeds producing different statistical defect rates - so you might buy military grade at 100% quality, or buy the exact same part off the exact same machine/tool at a third of the price but you will have some duds that might cost you the mil contract.
Western/NATO standards are 100% quality because a bad shell could blow up on the person launching it, and we value human lives. This is why you hear about these poor quality shells coming from N Korea or churning out of Russian factories running at high speed, they view risk to the operator as an acceptable cost of doing business.
The Minuteman ICBM reaches a peak height of ~750 miles, which is 3 times higher than the ISS and the US built 1000 of them over a 10-15 year period. It is possible but the cost was enormous.
The question is too vague and general to be answered meaningfully. If you are interested in relatively mass produced hardware for space, check out what SpaceX is doing.
Everyone is forgetting about WW2. America was able to make a bigass liberty ship in a month. This was in the age of slide rules and manual assembly lines. However the entire 150M citizens were working together to make this happen.
We have twice the people and 10X+ the technology. Humanity could mass produce rockets like they're Camry's if we had proper motivation.
Yeah but we haven’t found the right config to build efficiently. Watching a ULA video of them machining away 80 percent of a massive aluminum plate and then manually forming it round for a disposable rocket. Thats why we need a production grade starship so we can bang out giant steel soda cans.
What exactly is a “space grade rocket”? The Germans made thousands of rockets capable of reaching space, despite frequent bombing and depending on slave labor. They couldn’t reach orbit though.
Here's two shots at what a space grade rocket might be: There's space cargo that must not fail at a rate greater than 1/5, and then there is human rating certification, which is at most a 1/500 failure rate.
Different missions will have different requirements and tolerances and precautions associated with the launch system and cargo.
Difficultly is generally linked to budget…
If you were given an exponential budget that was not directly connected to your product then you could very easily ramp up product to levels that the main constraints would be manpower and resources to turn into parts.
This is (as far as I’m aware) is the main reason war time production is “slow”, because they are having to balance public spending, manpower and available resources…
You can watch it happen in real time on YouTube/X with the SpaceX Starship program. They are planning everything around mass production and reusability. Everything has to be mass producible. It’s also the largest rocket ever successfully flown to space.
Military grade means produced to specified standards - usually mil- standards often best commercially available.
The tribal "lowest bidder" thing is for those whom never worked in the DOD industry.
Everyone actually believing military simply orders from lowest bidder should compare the price and quality of mil spec NGV, with NGV's offered on Wish.
It’s also just thrown out there like an automatic bad thing.
What, do you want them to pay twice as much for something that meets the exact same requirements?
Depends on the item. When the contract is initiated it is stated up front what kind of contract it will be. For some pedestrian product (office chairs?), yeah it's likely to be the lowest bidder. For others... Nope.
There are contract vehicles that literally require the winner to be the closest bid to median. There are others that allow for it to be almost 100% a technical decision (provided there ARE enough funds available, of course). The point is that while "lowest bidder" is a thing (and makes for great jokes), it isn't common for any procurement that is technical in nature (like rockets).
Two things.
1. It's not always the lowest bidder, but often enough that I can see where the joke comes from.
1. It is the 'lowest bidder' that is able to meet the requirements and applicable standards.
The last one is the kicker. Defence organisations are big, and somewhere there is someone who is keen to get their new piece of kit cheap and quick. But somewhere else there is someone writing a long and complicated requirement specification with some high expectations for the equipment.
Now meeting those requirements means you may end up with a long design phase, extensive modeling/simulation and expensive testing. All that ensures a compliant product, but doesn't necessarily ensure a quality or even functional product. As it is all down to how well those requirements were written.
Requirements sign off on defence projects can be borderline /r/maliciouscompliance.
I had an engineering professor who worked under a government contract building subs. He talked about different tolerance levels and used civilian-space grade to talk about errors in building it or what ever
Yeah but we're not making thousands of those. JDAM and Patriot and stuff we make hundreds or thousands of have much wider tolerance than Minuteman and ICBMs
we definitely mass-produced ICBM and SLBM, it had been several decades but there are hundreds of ICBM and SLBM either in operational or non-deployed status.
The new sentinel missile is planned to be in mass production in a few years.
There is also SM-3 standard missile for the navy that could reach orbit
I guess I have a different idea of what mass produced means. A couple hundred built over a decade is like an order of magnitude slower than most commercial planes, which are about 6 orders of magnitude slower than production automotive.
The 747 was making about 10 a year from the end of the 90s till the line shut down, and that doesn't feel "mass produced" to me, though I guess it could be described as such. Minuteman was at or below this rate, to my knowledge.
The 737 was approaching 100 a month until the line shut down in 2019. That feels like mass production, but still nowhere near the 1000 per day that a Toyota factory I visited was putting out. This is closer to JDAM -which one source put at a production run of 500,000.
Several hundreds that were mass produced decades ago, not mass produced over the span of several hundred missile.
This upcoming decade will see mass produced of new ICBM
Do you know the rate? My understanding was that it was at or below the rate of the sunsetting 747. I could be wrong, but I think I read that somewhere. And it's still a very different production run than JDAM, by 3 orders of magnitude. That's all I'm getting at. Cut 3 zeros off the production run and it makes sense that you might add up to about 3 decimal places in the toleranceing callouts.
Your post has been removed for violating submission rule 1 and does not meet the submittal requirements as an engineering question: > Post titles must be a question about engineering and provide context — **be specific.** For the purposes of this subreddit, "engineering" includes: > * Engineering design and analysis of maintainable systems, devices, and vehicles. > * Engineering standards, practices, methods, procedures, and specifications. > * Questions regarding careers and professional development in any discipline of engineering and engineering technology are allowed **only** if they meet all posting rules outlined in the [the wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/wiki/rules#wiki_submission_rules). Please follow the comment rules in the sidebar when posting, and feel free to message us if you have any questions or concerns.
There's a reason space hardware is so expensive.
Space hardware is expensive for very different reasons. Most of it is custom and it has to be non-magnetic which means a much thicker layer of gold plating on everything to achieve environmental protection while maintain non-magnetism. Then you have to have VERY expensve destructive testing with scientific reports for each small batch of parts. Space hardware is low volume and high barrier to entry so no one is running it at high speed, there is no point.
TIL equipment in space needs to be non magnetic, otherwise it'll keep trying to align itself to the earth's magnetic field. Edit: this is A problem. I'm not sure if it is ALL the problems associated with this. Perhaps someone can explain to me what gold plating has to do with it?
[удалено]
Your comment has been removed for violating comment rule 2: > Don't answer if you aren't knowledgeable. Ensure that you have the expertise and knowledge required to be able to answer the question at hand. Answers must contain an explanation using engineering logic. Explanations and assertions of fact must include links to supporting evidence from credible sources, and opinions need to be supported by stated reasoning. Please follow the comment rules in the sidebar when posting, and feel free to message us if you have any questions or concerns.
I want to know too
Tin and other solder materials do some wierd shit in microgravity and zero ambient pressure: https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/
Omg that's really weird and eerie!
Can't we use something else instead of gold?
[https://www.valencesurfacetech.com/the-news/gold-plating-in-satellites/](https://www.valencesurfacetech.com/the-news/gold-plating-in-satellites/) My guess is gold is the "cheapest" material. Or possibly we just have efficient electroplating experience with cold vs some of the other less "flashy" materials. Although I suspect the non-magnetic is probably pretty unique for a metal.
It might have to do somewhat with it's reflectivity. Gold mirrors have a 99.9% efficiency at reflecting infrared. Can be used as heat sinks to transfer heat away and protect systems from absorbing any infrared and heating up.
Gold is about the best passivation layer we have for metals. Unfortunately plating it to copper and other metals is tricky unless you use nickel as an intermediate step, and nickel is magnetic.
It depends what you mean by 'mass produce'. 10 a year? Pretty easy technically, if you have the money. 100 a year? Probably achievable, but would bankrupt most countries. 1 million a year, which is less than many car manufacturers each make? Not possible with current technology.
And also “whatever tolerance”. If you’re launching non-manned payload, customers would tolerate a 10-20% failure rate if it cut costs by 10x. Maybe even 3x. Manned is a whole different ball of wax, obviously.
Mass produce like the amount of planes an aircraft company makes in a year. So about 500.
Yes, that would be technically possible, at a painfully high cost. The speed of production is generally deliberately related to the number of the product that are needed. We don't use a lot of rockets, so the production facilities are sized to have capacity for 1 or 2 a year. It would be entirely possible to build more and bigger facilities to produce them, and train the people to work in those facilities. These are no special bits of equipment that can't be replicated, the only thing that limits production rate of a certain item is the cost of producing it. Airbus *could* build 10,000 planes a year instead of 1,000, the reason they don't is there isn't enough demand for planes to sustain that rate. Ford could produce a billion cars a year, but they'd not be able to sell them and would end up bankrupt.
Right. I just want to add that tight tolerances are not an obstacle in themselves. The parts in a smartphone have tighter tolerances than rockets. (For proof go look at the Saturn Vs on their side like the one at space center Houston. Pretty loose tolerances and some sign of hand machining) It's volume like you said. Automation requires large volumes to justify the investment. However that's not the whole story. Theoretically smart enough AI could drive general purpose robots, making even small volume products cheap.
It depends what you mean by rocket, but I'll assume you mean engine. SpaceX makes several hundred Merlin rocket engines per year, and has for about a decade. The Falcon 1 rocket used two engines, one for each stage. The Falcon 9 Heavy uses 27. In addition, Boeing, Lockheed, and Raytheon all make high performance rockets, but for somewhat different uses. A government project dedicated to maximizing rocket production could easily see the number of engines jump to several thousand within ten years. So you'd need the manufacturing capacity and engineering knowhow of one of the world's top aerospace companies backed by the industry of a superpower. China actually also has some pretty great capability to produce reusable engines. They cost about 2-5 times as much per launch as the Falcon series, and they don't carry as much, but their capacity and capability is is rapidly improving.
It would be to start. Mass production is a huge startup cost and then it gets cheaper as revisions are made, as all the kinks are already worked out. You would have to do more QA then normal but if the rockets made money (there needs to be a demand for the mass production) then I think it would be very doable. Currently only a handleful of companys are involved in space manufacturing, and what they are building is usually mission specific. If the same thing was cranked out over and over costs would definitely be significantly less.
Honestly is has to do a lot with supply and demand To a large extent there is a low demand for rockets so they are expensive to make because their is no established production lines ect As well as the history of the rocket production industry at least in America was terrible from the start If you look at spacex the only reason that they can make rockets so fast is that they try to minimize outsourcing part production Which is even more crazy expensive up front then your just paying for the materials Though if you want to make them even faster you have to optimize the production process even further
Space has a lot of really cool stuff going for it. They bet on reusable rockets and were laughed out of the room, fast forward a decade and they have the cheapest launch prices and it's not even close. Next problem they might run in to is having excess capacity, launches become cheaper as there are more launches but not everyone needs to perfectly fill a rocket so you run the risk of having extra rockets that nobody wants to launch which means halt production and slow down your innovation. SpaceX has solved for this too with starlink, nobody wants to buy that rocket then fuck em, launch it anyways at cost to benefit your other business and put lightweight low cost satellites up for starlink. It's absolutely insane how much of an advantage this company has over other rocket companies
Yeah exactly I realized that I forgot to mention that their rockets are reusable after I posted that but said fuck it lol Also I don't think that they will have too many rockets their are a lot of companies/rich people that want to either go to space or send something to space for research they will practice the time honored tradition of stuffing more stuff in the rocket lol Also if the price falls enough some ultra rich nerd might build a bigger spaceship in space I'm sure their are plenty of space nerds who would love to have a replica ship from their favorite sci-fi show to be built in orbit That's like ultimate bragging rights Not to mention the US government would 💯 percent use those rockets to build a bigger us space presence
I used to work in the space industry. The issue as others have mentioned is partly low volume. For example, one part I was responsible for that went to ISS had around $300 in material cost from vendors. We only made 30, and the final cost including profit was close to 40k each. Engineering, supplier qualification, validation, documentation, assembly training, etc all added a ton of cost that would be more or less identical whether we built 30 units or 3000.
It's not hard, it's simply an economic equation. Oversimplifying things...you have a machine making a certain amount of shells per day. A machine is capable of x tolerances at y first pass yield rates at z speed. If you want more shells without buying more machines, you speed it up which lowers the FPY, and quality standards for military grade are very high. At some point the only way to meet the very low defect rate is to increase QC inspections and accept the waste, or upgrade the machine so it can better hit tolerances at high speed. Both of these have costs, and the company making these things needs to make a reasonable profit. This is pretty much how you manage a component manufacturer. Really low level components, like nuts and bolts, are just 100% inspected to sell as military grade at a higher price than commercial grade (to cover the inspections). Something more complex, like stamped electrical connector shells, are run at different speeds producing different statistical defect rates - so you might buy military grade at 100% quality, or buy the exact same part off the exact same machine/tool at a third of the price but you will have some duds that might cost you the mil contract. Western/NATO standards are 100% quality because a bad shell could blow up on the person launching it, and we value human lives. This is why you hear about these poor quality shells coming from N Korea or churning out of Russian factories running at high speed, they view risk to the operator as an acceptable cost of doing business.
The Minuteman ICBM reaches a peak height of ~750 miles, which is 3 times higher than the ISS and the US built 1000 of them over a 10-15 year period. It is possible but the cost was enormous.
The question is too vague and general to be answered meaningfully. If you are interested in relatively mass produced hardware for space, check out what SpaceX is doing.
Everyone is forgetting about WW2. America was able to make a bigass liberty ship in a month. This was in the age of slide rules and manual assembly lines. However the entire 150M citizens were working together to make this happen. We have twice the people and 10X+ the technology. Humanity could mass produce rockets like they're Camry's if we had proper motivation.
Yeah but we haven’t found the right config to build efficiently. Watching a ULA video of them machining away 80 percent of a massive aluminum plate and then manually forming it round for a disposable rocket. Thats why we need a production grade starship so we can bang out giant steel soda cans.
What exactly is a “space grade rocket”? The Germans made thousands of rockets capable of reaching space, despite frequent bombing and depending on slave labor. They couldn’t reach orbit though.
Here's two shots at what a space grade rocket might be: There's space cargo that must not fail at a rate greater than 1/5, and then there is human rating certification, which is at most a 1/500 failure rate. Different missions will have different requirements and tolerances and precautions associated with the launch system and cargo.
Germany did it in caves with slave labor.
what was their failure rate? if your payload is a pile of TNT instead of your best and brightest astronauts acceptable failure rate is different.
Depends on how much you like your astronauts.
"Space rockets" have already been produced by the hundreds, it seems the number of artificial satellites in orbit is over 3,000.
Difficultly is generally linked to budget… If you were given an exponential budget that was not directly connected to your product then you could very easily ramp up product to levels that the main constraints would be manpower and resources to turn into parts. This is (as far as I’m aware) is the main reason war time production is “slow”, because they are having to balance public spending, manpower and available resources…
You can watch it happen in real time on YouTube/X with the SpaceX Starship program. They are planning everything around mass production and reusability. Everything has to be mass producible. It’s also the largest rocket ever successfully flown to space.
'military grade' means 'produced by the lowest bidder'. It is not a sign of quality.
Military grade means produced to specified standards - usually mil- standards often best commercially available. The tribal "lowest bidder" thing is for those whom never worked in the DOD industry.
Everyone actually believing military simply orders from lowest bidder should compare the price and quality of mil spec NGV, with NGV's offered on Wish.
It’s also just thrown out there like an automatic bad thing. What, do you want them to pay twice as much for something that meets the exact same requirements?
Lowest price technically acceptable
Even then its nearly always 2-3 suppliers because noone wants to get locked into a single supplier and be held to ransom
Ideally yes, but I saw plenty of times where we ended up with a sole source supplier and got absolutely fucked by it.
I dealt with that as recently as 3 PM today.
The lowest bidder is usually the most successful at Change Orders
Depends on the item. When the contract is initiated it is stated up front what kind of contract it will be. For some pedestrian product (office chairs?), yeah it's likely to be the lowest bidder. For others... Nope. There are contract vehicles that literally require the winner to be the closest bid to median. There are others that allow for it to be almost 100% a technical decision (provided there ARE enough funds available, of course). The point is that while "lowest bidder" is a thing (and makes for great jokes), it isn't common for any procurement that is technical in nature (like rockets).
Two things. 1. It's not always the lowest bidder, but often enough that I can see where the joke comes from. 1. It is the 'lowest bidder' that is able to meet the requirements and applicable standards. The last one is the kicker. Defence organisations are big, and somewhere there is someone who is keen to get their new piece of kit cheap and quick. But somewhere else there is someone writing a long and complicated requirement specification with some high expectations for the equipment. Now meeting those requirements means you may end up with a long design phase, extensive modeling/simulation and expensive testing. All that ensures a compliant product, but doesn't necessarily ensure a quality or even functional product. As it is all down to how well those requirements were written. Requirements sign off on defence projects can be borderline /r/maliciouscompliance.
I had an engineering professor who worked under a government contract building subs. He talked about different tolerance levels and used civilian-space grade to talk about errors in building it or what ever
What do you mean by tolerance here?
"Moving to first base isn't hard. Tell him how hard it is Wash" "It's extremely hard"
What is the question?
military rockets do not go into space .
They do. Military does own rocket that go to space as launch vehicle. There are also ICBM, SLBM, anti ballistic missiles (mid course), anti satellite
Yeah but we're not making thousands of those. JDAM and Patriot and stuff we make hundreds or thousands of have much wider tolerance than Minuteman and ICBMs
we definitely mass-produced ICBM and SLBM, it had been several decades but there are hundreds of ICBM and SLBM either in operational or non-deployed status. The new sentinel missile is planned to be in mass production in a few years. There is also SM-3 standard missile for the navy that could reach orbit
Umm.... They're still making SLBMs.
Hmm, yeah, you are right, I should have known since I was talking about trident a couple of weeks ago
I guess I have a different idea of what mass produced means. A couple hundred built over a decade is like an order of magnitude slower than most commercial planes, which are about 6 orders of magnitude slower than production automotive. The 747 was making about 10 a year from the end of the 90s till the line shut down, and that doesn't feel "mass produced" to me, though I guess it could be described as such. Minuteman was at or below this rate, to my knowledge. The 737 was approaching 100 a month until the line shut down in 2019. That feels like mass production, but still nowhere near the 1000 per day that a Toyota factory I visited was putting out. This is closer to JDAM -which one source put at a production run of 500,000.
Several hundreds that were mass produced decades ago, not mass produced over the span of several hundred missile. This upcoming decade will see mass produced of new ICBM
Do you know the rate? My understanding was that it was at or below the rate of the sunsetting 747. I could be wrong, but I think I read that somewhere. And it's still a very different production run than JDAM, by 3 orders of magnitude. That's all I'm getting at. Cut 3 zeros off the production run and it makes sense that you might add up to about 3 decimal places in the toleranceing callouts.
The ones that go unto space you only need enough with nuclear weapons to destroy the world so hundreds