# Cost of autonomous habitat largely produced from 1 or 10 million units

Given you would design and built a fully autonomous habitat module for 2-6 people to survive on long term on Mars. I.e. a nuclear power source, solar cells, air/water recycling, tools.. Given, after some iteration and testing the design can be experimentally validated. Then you would plan for a production of 1 million/10 millions of such units. What could a unit cost offered on free market?

UPD. Recent prototype examples from NASA's 3D-printed habitat challenge.

• Several of the systems you need barely exist in prototype form. I don't see how we can give a cost estimate for building a productionized version of those prototypes. – Hobbes Aug 9 at 12:05
• @Hobbes added link to NASA's challenge regarding 3D printed habitats. – J. Doe Aug 10 at 10:50

For the purposes of this question, I will say 500,000 in material costs for a small volume build. The design of this module would likely take a small team of ~10 engineers around 3 or 4 years to design based on aerospace administrative constraints. My guess is that this is a very conservative development cost. Let's say that these engineers make 40 dollars an hour This puts us at $2000*10*40*4$ which puts us at a total cost of 3,200,000 is development costs. Now I'm no economist and estimating the true production cost for high volume is difficult, but I believe it would be possible to get the production costs down to between 200k-300k per module including labor. Tacking on the development cost, which becomes negligible if we produce 1,000,000 units, I would expect them to market for around 500,000.