Science & Technology

How much would the Enterprise cost to run ?

By T.K. Randall
July 30, 2016

Image: Leonard Nimoy
Credit: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0 (adapted) Monetary considerations might have been far from the minds of the Enterprise crew as they boldly explored strange new worlds and sought out new life and new civilizations, but if the iconic starship existed in today's real-world economy, how expensive would it be to keep going ?

To work this out, Derby-based firm SGS Engineering decided to break the costs down in to several categories such as general maintenance, crew salaries, performance upgrades and repairs.

They then took a real-world analogue of the Enterprise - the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford - and used its running costs to work out the expenses for a ship of approximately twice that size.Taking everything in to account and basing the calculation on today's money, they determined that the Enterprise would cost approximately £10,342,817.36 per year to run.

Based on these same calculations the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars fame, being much smaller than the Enterprise, would only cost around £2 million per year to maintain.

Given that the International Space Station costs billions of dollars every year to run however it's likely that the cost of running a real-life interstellar starship would be exponentially higher.

Source: Huffington Post

Tags: Star Trek, Enterprise