Expensive stuff ... I mean really, REALLY expensive!

What is the single most expensive man made object in the world? The space shuttle? The new World Trade Center? I don’t believe I’m thinking BIG enough. Help!

Reported for forum change.

F-35?

International Space Station

Something like the Golden Gate Bridge or Hoover Dam?

Maybe the Great Pyramid of Giza? I’m not sure how you’d put a price on it.

Yeah but … The international space station is not “in the world.”

Fair enough, but the space shuttle was mentioned in the OP, so I thought ISS would be fair game.

True. The ISS would probably win if it counted. How about an aircraft carrier?

Moved to GQ.

According to the List of most expensive buildings in the world, the Hajj Mosque costed upwards of $100B…

The Gerald Ford Aircraft carrier seems to cost:

Program cost: $36.30 billion[1](FY15)
Unit cost: $10.44B[1](FY15)

Some items hit the ‘priceless’ level in the real sense so nobody can buy them. The Mona Lisa, Hope diamond and the Great Pyramid are among them so I am not sure if there is a single answer. Sure, France or Egypt may relent if something horrible happens and they need some indeterminate amount of money to keep their country going but some things are not currently for sale even at ISS level prices.

Do you want to include cost for research and development? How many single items can be included if they go together as a package or idea? What about something that exists and can be made to work again but not easily like a Saturn V rocket that can take people to the moon again? What about property like Yellowstone National park that is bigger than some countries?

Never mind; I didn’t realize how many of them we’ve built (it’s over 100, so the $1.5 trillion current project cost is a measly $10 billion or so apiece at this point).

Yellowstone is not man made.

Yellowstone isn’t man made. I guess I wasn’t thinking research and development but merely the cost of the object. And in $2016. I wonder how much the Great Wall of China would cost now?

How about the first atomic bombs? I was just reading a site that said the Manhattan Project cost the equivalent of thirty billion dollars if you adjusted for inflation. We got two bombs out of it, so call it fifteen billion dollars for each. Not quite the International Space Station but that’s a lot of money for something you only use once.

If the Great Wall is considered a single object then why not the US highway system?

The infrastructure built during the Manhattan project was used to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of bombs.

Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways

If you want to count “The U.S. Military” as one man-made thing:

For the 2011 fiscal year, the president’s base budget for the Department of Defense and spending on “overseas contingency operations” combine to bring the sum to $664.84 billion.[2][3]

That was just for one year of Militarying.