Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[es1]

Well here is something interesting. For those who wish to speculate on what it would take to produce silk. Corrections requested

This is the company that made the 1st (and only?) automated silk reeling machine.
They hold 38 patents on the reeler so I think if we are going to do it this is how.

http://www.tianfengchina.com/en/product/?99_461.html

Length: 27936mm 25736mm(360ends)(89 Ft) 23536mm(320ends)(77 Ft)
Length of each unit: 2200mm (7 ft)
Width: 1477mm(4 Ft)
Total width: 3326mm (8Ft)
Total height: 1816mm.(5 ft)
Raw material: The length of non-broken filament = 500 meters

Machine assignment: 8 persons per set of 400 ends

Output per machine per hour(10ends): 400-650(From older machine)

If I am seeing this correctly each machine 40-65 cocoons an hour

So 8 people with a 400 end unit doing 40-60 an hour (calling it 50)
is 20,000 cocoons an hour.
At 1M cocoons per ton it will take 8 people 50 hours (400 man hours) to reel the cocoons.
At $10 per hour the labor costs to unreel is $4000 per ton (not counting tax etc).

Basing it on normal silk costs this machine could produce $250K of silk a month and require about 2000 sq ft of shop space.

With normal silk being $60K a ton this is feasible for MS in the USA. I don't know about raising them. That is where I would think the labor costs would be.