Buildings can cost a lot of money to build, since they don’t just come out of the ground,
and some buildings can be ludicrously expensive for a variety of reasons.
So, what is the most expensive thing we’ve ever built?
Starting in the most obvious places to look, you might think the best places to look might
be somewhere like Dubai or China, and while the middle east and eastern Asia have both
seen huge construction booms, neither area really has a building with the title of “most
expensive”.
In Dubai, the world famous Burj al-Arab cost around $1 billion (USD), and the Burj Khalifa,
the tallest building in the world, cost $1.5 billion to build, which is actually somewhat
inexpensive for a building of its size.
China has no buildings on the list, unless you include Macau, whose most expensive structure
is the Venetian Macau, which cost around $2.5 billion.
Singapore’s most expensive structure is, of course, the famous Marina Bay Sands, at
$5.5 billion, which beats out America’s most expensive, the $5-billion Apple Park,
Apple’s corporate headquarters.
The most expensive building on Earth is the Abraj al-Bait, in Mecca, which cost the Saudi
Government $15 billion to build.
Though nowadays it virtually defines the skyline of the holy city, I’m not here to talk about
it today.
Maybe in a future video, who knows?
However, though it might be the most expensive structure ever built on Earth, it is not the
most expensive thing we’ve built.
That honor actually goes to the International Space Station, which cost over 10 times the
amount it cost to build the Abraj al-Bait, at $160 billion.
So, what went into building this thing?
Unsurprisingly, the majority of the cost of the ISS came from transporting it to its location.
If you’ve ever played Kerbal Space Program long enough, you’ll know pretty well that
space stations don’t function very well when they’re not in space, and since the
entire point of the ISS was to be in a 0G, vacuum environment, and house six people at
a time there, this was a pretty non-negotiable detail.
The thing is, however, though the ISS is small fry compared to the skylines of Dubai and
Singapore, it’s still nothing to sneeze at.
The ISS is about 109 meters by 73 meters wide, and weighs, or… masses 417 tonnes.
Rocket launches can be expensive, but the ISS wasn’t built in a single launch, but
over the course of dozens of launches to send new modules, exchange crew, and bring new
supplies.
The Space Shuttle was launched there 26 times, just to bring up new modules.
The ISS was actually started in 1998, with the Russian Zarya module, and wasn’t complete
until 2011.
Owning up to its name, the International Space Station was mainly built by the US (who contributed
about $100 billion), along with the EU, Russia, Japan and Canada.
It wasn’t just building the ISS that was expensive, maintaining the ISS is also monstrously
expensive, at around $3 billion every year, twice the cost to build the Burj Khalifa;
and this is up against NASA’s federal budget, which was $19.1 billion for 2018.
Maintaining the ISS is a whole new ordeal, especially when staffed, and many wonder if
it’s worth the investment (it is).
Objects in low Earth orbit can’t even remain dormant for the economic/political climate
down on Earth to improve, since, being still well inside the exosphere, their orbits are
gradually decaying, and they need a boost every once in a while.
The ISS has brought the spacefaring world together, but if relations sour, the ISS often
has to be shielded from the hit list.
In 2014, after sanctions were enacted on Russia for their invasion of Crimea, the ISS was
pretty much the only thing that NASA and Roscosmos collaborated on, just to keep the thing operational.
Unfortunately, the ISS currently looks like it might not survive the 2020s, due to its
high costs.
I’d start a bake sale, but that probably wouldn’t be enough, and also I can’t bake
very well.
Thank you for watching this video, and if you enjoyed it, please be sure to give it
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Also, what do you think?
Should the ISS remain open past 2028?
I’d personally say a resounding yes, but I’m curious about your opinion.
Let’s have a discussion about it in the comments, because that totally never goes
wrong.