3 ms·

A monumental fuckup of this magnitude makes me wish that this was some kind of smoke screen to cover the cost of some other kind of R&D of technology we can sca

• gchpaco 13y ago
  Are you kidding? My father works in aerospace for firms doing subcontracting on non-black projects and every time he talks about work it would be about some new ridiculous boondoggle. I remember some idiots conducting testing managed to pick up and drop a piece of flight hardware the size of a car about six inches, which probably cost about $100K to realign and repair. The ISS went through I think three or four--or maybe five?--ground up redesigns requiring everybody throw everything they had already done completely out the window and start over. Many of us on the sidelines watching marveled quietly that it ever flew at all. Small teams with tight deadlines can do wonders. This is why Skunkworks stuck. But it's important to note that Kelly Johnson was behind a lot of the big successes there and he was an amazing man. Absent organizational genius, you can run into trouble. The JSF is pretty much the antithesis of "small teams with tight deadlines".