Manufacturers usually hope to break even after selling 60-80 units. It's the tooling that costs the bucks. In the plastics industry, molds are incredibly expensive. The mold for a laundry basket for example, might cost anywhere between $80,000 - $200,000 depending on the complexity of the geometry. But because the same mold is used many times over to manufacture, say, 1 million laundry baskets, the price of each unit only has to be, say $3.50, to cover the mold cost and a year of production costs. Now imagine how many unique tools and molds are needed for a new aircraft ! If the people who manufactured laundry baskets had the same sales expectations as aircraft or sounding rocket manufacturers, they would have to retail their baskets for $2500 bucks! Remember to toss your dirty laundry in the basket very, very, gently.