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Imagine that Boeing spent $10 billion to develop the 747—but instead of building hundreds and flying each of them daily (as is the case), they only built five and flew each one only once per year. Let’s say that Boeing didn’t make any profit, but sold the five airplanes to American Airlines for $2 billion apiece. Assuming that American Airlines can borrow money at less than ten percent interest, it has annual costs in aircraft payments of roughly $200 million per year for each airplane. Even if they had absolutely no other expenses (fuel, pilots, flight attendants, marketing, ticket agents, etc.), and if each aircraft had 400 seats, the airline would have to charge half a million dollars per ticket just to cover the loan for the aircraft purchase
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The Air Force and its launch contractors invested billions of dollars in the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program in the 1990s, with the goals of improving reliability and reducing costs for the existing Delta and Atlas rockets, built by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, respectively. The specific goal was to reduce their operating costs by 25 percent. In other words, they determined that by coming up with a new vehicle design, the best they could do was reduce costs by a quarter.
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after the “dot-com bubble” popped, one of the many casualties was the communications satellite market. Boeing has dropped out of the commercial launch market as a result, and the total expected flight rate for the Delta and Atlas EELVs has plunged, resulting in a per-flight cost rise of up to 50 percent. The lesson: A simple change in the market had a much larger effect on launch costs than the billions of dollars spent on redesigning the launchers.