I Don’t Need These Russians 134
which is a crazy ratio for a large mechanical product.”^305 In
comparison, the price of the material in a car in relationship
to the price of the car itself is about 25 percent. Neither
rocket fuel was the reason to why rockets were expensive.
The cost of the fuel and oxygen used in a modern rocket is
about 0.3 percent of the price.
If neither material nor rocket fuel could be blamed as
the reason to why rockets were so expensive, what was
the real reason? When SpaceX was founded, Boeing or
Lockheed manufactured most rockets. Their rockets were
far from cheap simply because they never needed to cut the
costs. The rockets were partly funded by the US govern-
ment, and if the rockets became more expensive than what
the contract with NASA said, they received more money.
Rockets that are more expensive were actually something
good. “If you were sitting at an executive meeting at Boeing
and Lockheed and you came up with some brilliant idea
to reduce the cost of Atlas or Delta, you’d be fired,” Elon
said. “Because you’ve got to go report to your shareholders
why you made less money. So their incentive is to max-
imize the cost of a vehicle, right up to the threshold of
cancellation.”^288
On the other hand, Skunk Works, a division of Lock-
heed and famous for aircraft like F-117 Nighthawk and SR-
71 Blackbird, gave back money to the government. They
gave it back either because they had brought in a project
under budget or because they saw that what they worked
with was just not going to work.^407
SpaceX’s plan was now complete. They would design