Believe the X-57 project started in mid-2016, so it lasted for seven years. So, about $12.5 million a year.
NASA has a very snazzy
website for the X-57. Interesting to note that, after seven years and $87 million dollars, the front page of the site seems to display exactly zero photos of real live hardware. Rather, it's endless graphics and renderings of what a flying X-57
would look like amongst the clouds.
Indeed, on NASA's "
Who's on the team" site, they list the following:
The fact that they feel the need to highlight the visual artists is an interesting choice. It's just like every other electric aircraft concept; long on impressive renderings and videos, very short on actual working hardware.
Further down the X-57's "Who's on the team" site, they highlight four NASA centers, along with seven different companies, for a total of 11 different entities, each taking a piece of the $87 million dollar pie. When Big NASA shows up with a bag of money, and asks if you can do "X," no one is going to raise their hands and say "we don't think that's technically feasible." That goes for NASA centers, and for private industry. Instead, everyone lines up at the trough for a chunk of the money, and starts to work. If the project fails, well, everyone just chalks it up to "science is hard," and other such nonsense.
In general, costs boil down to two things: Hardware, and people's time. Hardware wise, it's hard to tell all that's wrapped up in it. You have a Tecnam P2006 (about $750k), electric motors, batteries, etc. Along with all the other test fixtures, etc they bought. I dunno, figure maybe $20 million all-in?
$87 million total minus $20 million in hardware leaves you $67 million for people. With people, figure $100k per person per year, plus an additional 50% for overhead (give or take). That's $150k per person, per year.
$76 million in labor, spread over seven years, at $150k a head, averages out to about 72 bodies working full time on the project.
You know how government programs have reputations of a lot of "deadwood" amongst the employees, and a never ending list of inefficiencies? I bet if you visited those NASA centers and private companies, you'd have no problem finding dozens of employees charging their time to the X-57 project, while producing very little. Granted, they may think they're value-added, but the truth is often different.
Bottom line, as stated earlier, a lot of these programs are "make work" for the NASA centers and for industry.
