Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Does anyone know why wind tunnel use costs $500 an hour? Electricity bill?



Because someone will pay $500 per hour.


Setup costs.


That's my guess -- they must be quite expensive to build, with quite a bit of specialized hardware involved (not exactly off-the-shelf stuff!), and highly-specialized people to run it ...but then only one experiment can use the whole shebang at a time (including setup/teardown time), so they can't spread out the costs across lots of concurrent users.


It's not just a big fan, they also come with all the measurement equipment.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: