> The US government ended up spending a decade and over eighty million dollars just to research and rediscover the manufacturing process for this one particular

> The US government ended up spending a decade and over eighty million dollars just to research and rediscover the manufacturing process for this one particular component. Well, we didn't exactly "rediscover" the process for manufacturing FOGBANK. That's because we never actually knew the process -- we just thought we did. The previous production process just happened to include a contaminant that turned out to be a critical ingredient. This is what we had to discover. As for the money -- how much would it have cost to keep the existing facility running for the past few decades? If this is more than $80 million (including inflation), then it was better to stop manufacturing it.