Linux_Yes: i can tell you how. YOU and every other taxpayer is paying for it.

and of course, the Nashole Contractor who provided it is laughing all the way to the bank.

isn't Freedom great!!

Urm...have you ever tried to design anything to MSFC standards? I'm guessing "no", because the closest you've likely come to designing anything was the last time you had to do a kernel recompile of code someone else wrote.

Not only isn't it the sort of bag you can buy at Lowes, there's a good possibility they had to contract the materials to be made to spec. Then you have to do testing out the ass, all by labs that aren't free of charge, then you have to have tons of documentation. And you have to maintain it forever, more or less.

It's also possible the thing had to be assembled in a clean room, it depends on what the specs were.

And you build how many - two? five? You have to add in all sorts of costs for that which would have been amortized over a large production run, but you've only got a dozen maybe so you divide it by - 12. That jacks the price up too.

A lot of times, you have to divide the NRE over the production as well. That's because they don't have a mechanism to pay for NRE. So you have all these guys out finding materials that meet that three inch think MSFC document that relates to that sort of item. Hell, just reading it and having it down pat takes weeks. It's not like reading a comic book. You have to charge all of that, and engineering time is pretty damned pricey. We charge loaded labor for non-PhD's on open projects out at about 200 an hour here, and it would be worse than that on classified stuff. That SCIF isn't going to file its own paperwork.

A bag is small beans. You ought to try designing a server to MSFC. We did a really nice design for NASA years ago that was basically a sort of image data server. I won't comment on what sort. That was a pain in the arse, because NASA also wanted to offer it to our Soviet brothers for use on Mir as a backup station controller, so we had to design it for both systems, and my wasn't that a pain in the butt. The power supply was probably the worst part. Because, again, you can't mosey over to Best Buy and get one. It's all from scratch, and no-single-point-of-failure, and several layers of protection from damaging the spaceframe's power source, and no fans, a lot of common materials are banned, and the power you're getting is crap. One thing after another. Of course, it has to be two cubic inches and weigh a gram, and you'll be on the phone begging for weird ass parts to fit the restrictions. And after all that, we build maybe 10 of them. But we had to maintain strict documentation on each and every part. Where it came from, what lot it was from, what date it was made, how it was stored (with humidity charts and stuff for ICs), how and when it was assembled on and on for every damned part. Every time someone touched a board assembly, more docs. And then you had to destroy half of them in tests. G force tests, EMF susceptibility, HALT, HASS, emissions, there's a big list. Then you have to generate mil spec life projections, which takes forever.

Do all that at 200 plus an hour. And build 10. And maintain it for years. See, you have to jack that in there too. During the course of the project life, you have to be out there at a moment's notice, ready to go. So there's flight costs, room and board, and engineering time on site, which is more expensive since you have to have a support team back here. You have to put that in your upfront projections and charge for it.

There's a lot that goes into that per unit cost. They no doubt made some money on it but I doubt they're laughing all the way to the bank.

But of course, there's always the odd 20 year old ignorant twit like yourself, who thinks he can say "Durr I can get a bag at Target for 10 dollars hurr durr they are teh evil capitalists", because you are talking out your ass.

dball2 drooled out of the side of his mouth:

God I admire you

Considering neither you nor linux_yes knew what NRE meant until you looked it up just now, your comment doesn't mean much.

I'm guessing you're one of the 20 year old ignorant twits? Hey, there's still hope. Put down the bong and the Wii controller and get a degree in engineering or physics, you could do some kickass designs too. Maybe.

/working on boards for the secure forward command post project now
//and yes, they're pricey
///not for ground-benign environment

Linux_Yes:
yes, hi tech things do cost more.

but, unlike you, i'm also aware that companies frkkk the government every chance they get.

if you haven't figured that out yet, you must be a republican.

ever hear of a 700 dollar hammer??

Unlike you, I design things for the government, so I have a bit more informed opinion on the matter.

Like I said upthread, there's a lot to that "700 dollars". You can't compare the pricing for mass-produced consumer articles to that of very small run high-rel products with oddball design criteria, a ton of testing, and all the NRE and production costs amortized over a tiny production run, especially when you factor in lifetime support.

But hey, if WSWS.org said it's an evil capitalist trick, it must be true, eh?

Linux_Yes: erewhon: Linux

an MSFC server?? and let me guess, you installed windows on it???

after all, since it costs money, it has to be better than Linux/BSD UNIX. Conficker worm is extra, though.

MSFC is Marshall Space Flight Center. Not microsoft.

There's not that much MS software on stuff we do, although we often test with it. Lots of WindRiver software, SCO was big some years back, Solaris for x86 is another one you see pretty often. Although some projects do use Windows, that one did not. I couldn't tell you what the Russians ran on it.

What was funny was that after NASA gave them a few systems, there was some sort of non-connected political hoohah that broke out and State took them back, although not without protest. Designing for operation on Mir sucked ass. Horrible specs.

Linux_Yes: but, unlike you, i'm also aware that companies frkkk the government every chance they get.

Not that this doesn't happen. But not every company does it by a long shot. A lot of times the gubmint farks itself. (If you've never seen it, "The Pentagon Wars" is remarkably on target)

Sometimes, too, those bizarrely high quotes are a weird way to transfer money from line-item budgets to other projects.

loonatic112358:
I really need to raise my rates for drafting and design then.

Heck, we used to get something like $120 back when in the 90s when we got started for a MS working on a milspec design project.

I think the all time record per hour we got was $115,000 per hour for a BIOS - the firmware project was tied to a piece of hardware that got killed in mid-flight so all we had to do was assemble it and turn over a .bin file - there wasn't any way to prove it wasn't complete without hardware to test it on.

Which topped my previous record of $40,000 per hour for debugging a systems project out at Redstone - we contracted to debug a specific systems integration problem for 10K and I found it in 15 minutes. Man, were they sore when we invoiced them, which we probably wouldn't have except they had been dicks.