lid (John Savard) wrote:

On the Astronautix site, for example, the low cost
of the German V-2 is cited.

As it is in John Walker's egregious "A Rocket a Day Keeps the High
Costs Away," based on Ordway & Sharpe's _The Rocket Team._

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html

Walker does acknowledge that V-2s were produced by slave labor at the
Mittelwerk, where more people died than were killed by all the V-2s
ever launched. (I'll bet LockMart's costs would go down, too, if they
could hang under-performing staff from a traveling crane.)

Underneath that, though, he seems to assume that his cost figures
reflect formal accounting and chargebacks between the SS (which ran
production), Peenemunde R&D, and the Wehrmacht "customers." There was
no such accounting, and so the figures are close to meaningless.

I'm confident that mass production *would* dramatically lower the unit
cost of any given rocket, but the V-2 is a poor starting point for
such assertions.