That's speculation. Feasibility is no guarantee of performance.

I read the attached article, and there were two specific complaints cited. The first was security, which is a non-functional requirement; that could well be a failure of the customer to do his homework on requirements but presumably a competent and honest vendor could have done a better job on security. It's often the vendor's job to anticipate customer needs, particularly in projects of the type customers don't necessarily have experience with.

The other complaint is that the curriculum wasn't completely implemented. If the vendor failed to deliver something it agreed to, that's purely the vendor's fault.

Sometimes bad vendors happen to good customers. Bad vendors happen more often to bad customers, but every project involves taking a calculated risk.

Well, until the details of how the contract was awarded and how the vendor failed have been thoroughly investigated, it's premature to fire anyone.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for accountability and decisiveness, but picking someone plausible and throwing them under the bus isn't accountability. In fact that may actually shield whoever was responsible.

The booster can indeed make it back uprange to Kennedy Space Center, and they've leased a landing pad for it there. Besides the turn-around burn, they tilt the booster against the airstream and let aerodynamics push it back uprange during that 78 mile descent.

If there's one thing they should work on, it's not thrusters but having the capability to throttle to hover. That would potentially change the entire low approach. It is complicated by the fact that engine performance goes nonlinear in the low range.

Most consumer electronics will work just fine inside the vehicle cabin. (Engine bay and weather exposed areas is a different story) My company does automotive wiring and consumer electronics wiring and the differences in thermal and vibration and other performance specs are just not all that huge for the most part. Sometimes some increased temperature specs for engine bay stuff and being self-extinguishing can matter but that's not a big cost burden in most cases. I do the quoting and am both the engineer and accountant at our company so I know the numbers well.

No, most of the cost is simply design and volume related. Let me give you an example or two. We make a wire harness that has a grommet on it. We make two versions of it and the only difference is the size of the grommet. Why two versions? Because the engineers and Buick and the engineers and Chevy couldn't be bothered to talk to each other and standardize on a single grommet for both platforms. So we get a worse price because we have to buy two different grommets instead of a single one at a lower price. We also have some connectors on the harness. Instead of picking an off the shelf connector they decided to go with a custom connector despite it providing no performance benefit. So we have to buy 50,000 custom connectors with a 4 month lead time instead of using a standard connector carried by every distributor in North America for less money. Plus the volumes of production are a few hundred thousand. Sounds like a lot but compared to consumer electronics its almost nothing. Apple sells more iphones in a day than the number of harnesses we'll make this year. Volume drives discounts.

Someone just entering the workforce is likely to have minimal credit history and probably wouldn't be able to get a loan of any substantial size without a co-signer. It's not hard to get a junker for a few thousand dollars. I drove several for my early years in the workforce.

If you have to finance then do what you have to do. I did starting out. But do not keep an auto loan for a moment longer than necessary. It's almost always a bad financial decision.

I work in the industry. I can assure you that you are thinking malice where incompetence is MUCH better explanation. I've worked with engineers and executives directly at GM and Ford and several others. There is not a master plan for most of what they do. They are not that competent and certainly not that clever. You have to understand the design cycles and processes. Cars take 2-4 years to get designed and then the majority of the design is effectively frozen for 4-8 years. It takes an act of congress to get them to change a production part once a PPAP is completed and production has started.

They actually could make a lot more money by standardizing components and sub-systems and providing interfaces for third parties to work with. They just culturally do not know how to do this. They are too paranoid, too set in their ways and too slow for the most part. Their internal business culture reacts to changes and industry outsiders like an immune system forcing an allergy attack.

Here is the barge on the way to port, possibly with debris onboard. Here's a video of the landing shot from the barge itself. And I am waiting to see the barge from the Carnival Fascination webcam.

A video from the barge is now online here. If you step through the final frames, you can see that the camera mount ends up knocked over and pointing at the ocean, but the lens and its cover are unbroken and all we see flying appear to be small debris. So not a really high-pressure event.

It's very tempting to think this should work like an airplane. Lots of people wrote that it was "too hot", etc. But it isn't an airplane. The plan was really to approach at 1/4 Kilometer Per Second, then brake at the very last second.

Obviously Crew Dragon, which carries people, will approach differently. But it's a lot lighter.

In the F9R test videos they catch some of the backscatter from the engine and seem to catch fire. Maybe they were trying to avoid that. They are very light carbon composite. Or perhaps they mess up the airstream for precision navigation, or they don't like the 250 m/s wind.

It looked to me that the barge was structurally undamaged but that some heavy equipment on the deck was forcibly ejected. It's clear to see in the HD version. Those 1000 HP thrusters are expensive, and it looked to me like one of them going overboard. But I suspect they were prepared to lose more than one vessel in testing this.

And I bet there was a range safety self-destruct charge onboard. F9R blew itself up with one. But it was probably so safe that it didn't go off.

I understand the logic though whether or not it is a sensible decision depends heavily on how much you paid.

That is actually quite sensible. 2% interest is darn close to free money so I think that is a smart decision to finance given that you didn't actually have to. I would have strongly considered doing the same thing.

True but a lot of people buy far more expensive cars than they really can justify if they are being objective about it. A good example is pickup trucks. Ford and GM make the majority of their profits from large trucks with terrible gas mileage. The prices for these vehicles is much higher than their utility to the buyers would justify AND very few of the buyers actually utilize the full capabilities of the vehicle. Yet people buy droves of $30-50K+ F150 pickups. They do it for self image and because they can rather than because it is an objectively sensible decision.