I had a discussion recently with friends about the most expensive movable object ever built. We decided to leave out space missions or objects in outer space.
My conclusion was that it would be a Gerald Ford-class aircraft carrier - which are running in the $15-$18 billion range each. (the Nimitz-class ones cost less than $5 billion each). One has been completed; another within the next year or two; and a total of ten were originally planned over the next couple of decades.
Royal Dutch Shell’s Prelude floating LNG vessel hangs out off the coast here in Western Australia. It’s certainly moveable - it wasn’t built here, for example.
The exact cost was never released but I’ve seen estimates as high as 17Billion.
Wikipedia pegs it a little lower.
When I saw the topic, my first thought was an Apollo capsule or Space Shuttle, including the launch boosters. But then I saw the OP’s first paragraph, where “space missions” are being left out. However, the second paragraph allows for aircraft carriers, and it struck me that a “space mission” is not an “object”. The premise of the OP needs to be clarified, because if you’re going to exclude or include space vehicles then oceangoing vehicles should follow the same rule.
That said, what are the record-breaking prices for jewelry and artwork? They might surpass even those gigantic vehicles.
Or not. Wikipedia’s List of most expensive paintings doesn’t have any that reach even $1 Billion USD. Then I googled “most expensive jewelry” and found several lists, none of which had anything coming to even a decent fraction of that.
For movable (as opposed to self-moving) things, we don’t need to resort to anything exotic to beat the aircraft carrier quite easily. A cubic meter of gold is worth $1.2 billion, and weighs 19 tonnes.
The Gerald R Ford carrier weighs 100,000 tons, so the equivalent amount of gold would be worth, if my math is right(and it probably isn’t) $6,315,789,470,000,000. There has been 190,240 metric tons mined to date.
10 pounds of antimatter would cost around $113,398,000,000,000. I doubt any Uber driver wants to be anywhere near it though so guessing you would have to pay a lot to have someone move it for you without killing themselves and every within several miles.
I know you want to exclude spacecraft / space missions and the like (for unclear reasons) but my thoughts gravitate to the ISS, which most definitely moves: it does occasional orbit raising burns (rocket engine firings) to stay alive. Let me just throw this factlet in here, as it probably “wins” and there is nothing else like it, currently or before.
This page gives its cost (not price or value) as $150 billion USD, and says NASA spends $3 billion per year to keep it going. Other countries contribute too.
How are we counting R&D costs? Ignoring them and focusing on marginal cost per unit, amortizing across all objects of that type that are ever expected to exist, amortizing across those that actually have been made so far, or assigning all of the R&D costs to a single specimen?
The most expensive object might be some sort of prototype of which only one was ever made.
One could, I suppose, argue that the entire Manhattan Project was a lead-in to the Trinity test. That would be around $25B in today’s dollars. The project led to other things, but there was a moment in time when there was only a single functional product of the entire effort.
The more you think about R&D, the more it becomes apparent that there is no clear method to quantify the cost of a major technologically advanced “object”. What’s the starting point? Whether it’s a nuclear weapon or an aircraft carrier, it’s pretty arbitrary to just consider the R&D from when the project was given a name - scientific research and technological development going back to the invention of the wheel lead up to it. And once the technology has been developed and one “object” exists, the marginal cost of production may be negligible - making ten may cost little more than making one; and it seems a little odd to then say that a single object has lost 90% of its value just because more were made.
