>>11818654>Yeah but that was the Space Shuttle and hydroloxIt was a single tank (well two, because bipropellants, but whatever) and it cost over $70 million. It was made of the exact same alloys that Falcon 9 uses for its tanks, except it was designed without any consideration for reuse.
Sure, Shuttle was super expensive so maybe it doesn't make the best comparison, so have a look at Atlas V instead.
We know that ULA pays somewhere between 10 and 25 million dollars for each RD-180 they buy, and we know that an Atlas 401 (no solids, 4 meter fairing, single engine Centaur upper stage) is priced at $109 million. Let's be generous and say that fully half of the cost of the rocket is the 2nd stage and fairings. That means that the tanks on the first stage are between 54% and 81.6% of the cost of the rocket.
This makes sense, because unlike Spacex's more radical approach of doing the simplest and more effective structural design possible (via rapid prototyping) for Starship, most rocket tanks are actually extremely precision engineered pieces of hardware that are carefully manufactured by hand with extreme, autistic focus on minimizing mass at any cost. For Atlas and Delta and Vulcan, ULA puts huge slabs of aluminum into gigantic milling machines and meticulously carves out isogrids, before moving the entire slab over to a manually controlled bump press that two operators use to bend them to the exact curve necessary in order to assemble several of those curved slabs into a cylinder.
