Comment Re:Sigh... Yet another scam (Score 1) 233
To be fair, if you're off by 50% on a $1M project, you're out a couple year's salary for one engineer... if you're off by 50% on a $10B project, you owe somebody an aircraft carrier. You'd be an idiot to not be conservative on pricing things when they are that expensive, unless the contract covers development costs.
You do know what cost-plus contracting is, don't you? In essence, the company says, the project will cost what we say. And then add 20% profit on top. The government will then put auditing systems to track almost every purchase. However, that doesn't stop the company over-designing the system, or choosing a design that costs far more than it should. Or hiring layers upon layers of middle managers who do next to nothing. It costs what it will cost. And then Lockmart gets 20% profit on their already inflated prices.
This is why aerospace is so expensive in America. Lockmart and Boeing both rely on cost-plus financing. SpaceX does not. They give price per performance. Price to launch. Price to design and build. They only get paid if they do what they say.