How much would the Enterprise cost to run?

Via huffingtonpost.co.uk by Thomas Tamblyn

Since its creation, Star Trek has long inspired generations to explore the world of science, space and exploration.

At the centre of this fascination is a single spaceship, the USS Enterprise. A vast spacecraft, the Enterprise has become something of a science fiction icon.

While we know certain facts about the vessel there are some things that we know so little about.

For example, if we were to have our very own Enterprise today, how much would it cost to run?

Well an engineering company from Derby has claimed to work out an annual cost for maintaining the world’s most advanced spaceship.


How much? £10,342,817.36.

That’s right, just 10.3 million every year. Now while that seems pretty low considering we’ve managed to build two 200ft aircraft carriers for around £6bn, SGS engineering have an explanation:

• £5.2m to keep the ship running.
• £4.1m in crew salaries (although technically currency doesn’t exist in the 23rd Century).
• £946,825 in safety and performance upgrades.

How did they come to this figure? Well SGS quite sensibly tried to find a current equivalent, and they found that in the form of the world’s largest aircraft carrier the USS Gerald R. Ford.

“The Gerald R. Ford is currently the largest and most advanced ship military ship in the world – despite this it’s still roughly half the size of the Enterprise – and houses a hanger and advanced weaponry. Doubling the annual maintenance cost for the USS Gerald R Ford to reflect the Enterprise’s size, we arrived at the figure of £5,259,402.94.”

They then took the costs of keeping a crew paid:

“Using the same percentage of engineers to crew needed to run the Gerald R. Ford and their average salary we can assume that the annual labour costs of keeping Captain Kirk boldly going would be £4,136,589.44*.”

Factoring in maintenance costs and you’re left with around £10m per year.

Now we’re going to come out and say right now that we think that’s a very, very low sum.

Considering the ISS costs billions to maintain every single year. Of course much of that is in actually just getting the equipment up into space.

SGS have clearly tried to create a figure based in an environment where maintaining a spaceship is as cost effective as maintaining a vessel on water.

That makes some degree of sense, but when you think that there is a crowd-sourced plan to raise a trillion dollars to build the Enterprise you have to wonder.

Either way it’s an awful lot of money.

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