The perpetual fallacy in procurement of both the private and governmental sort is that it is possible to quantify innovation. If the original bid was 1.6, then yes it was dishonestly low and the NASA bureaucrats were incomeptent for not spotting it. On the other hand, find me a civil servant who thinks it's a good thing for his career to inflate the cost of an underbid contract, even if he does see it for what it is? It always takes two to tango.

Not if she outsources it to the lowest foreign bidder it wouldn't

With a pretty solid centrist record as governor, if I remember my history books correctly

Yeah, but it's the add, subtract, multiply and divide that must be missing...

What sort of echo chamber does this woman live in to think she's got a good record as a manager to run on? Romney at least made real money and ran a real state government. Fiorina started lots of pissing contests, got booted by the shareholders for loosing money and assets, and lost a senate (not even governor's) race. Wow.

No, Russia is to blame for thinking that it has a say over where their neighbors' alleigances lie, and for referring to engagement as "meddling"

Depends on the price and how easy it is to modify. There's a (small) mobile shelter and enclosure market mainly for military and disaster relief already, and there's pre-fabricated buildings and sheds you can buy that go on concrete pads. The question is how much would this cost relative to those for the given mission. My guess is that housing displaced people for a long time is sufficiently different from what we tend to need in the US that the design choices made in these units make them less than the ideal choice for other applications given the other available options.

no. people know politicians are evil. so which do you want: evil and stupid or evil and competent?

Same reason people go "hey, that's a good idea" when I tell them about how soviet-made cars in the 70's and 80's had backup handcranks stored in the trunk that you'd insert into a slot hidden behind the front license plate when your engine wouldn't turn over on its own. Western stuff just doesn't need those sorts of workarounds built ruight into it.

the fruits of civilization bringing freedom of information into the dark corners of totalitarianism.

No, the other ten probably had the same problem. Just no one in government could tell the difference.

Well then I must have just flubbed my arithmetic. Having zero visibility into the project, I'm just guessing. Hell, even on projects I work on that straddle the line between R&D and procurement I have a hard time putting a number on retention, but I do know that if an individual piece of work takes X months for one competent guy to do, and he quits after having his budget cut, restored, and then cut again, only to be restored the month after he leaves, it'll take ~0.5X months to find a replacement and bring him up to speed. And by definition he's not as good as the guy who left since he's new to the organization and doesn't have as finely resolved of a mental picture of the whole project and where his work fits in as the first guy did. Is that 1.5 times the cost for the same work? Maybe. Sometimes slack gets picked up, sometimes people burn out under the added load. Sometimes a flash of divine inspiration lets you do more with less, and sometimes the whole thing tanks because the guy walked out the door with 50% plus epsilon of the knowhow to get it done and the whole thing needs to be restarted or retendered.

EEs coming out of places like MIT with degrees in MATLAB. Physicists coming out of Stanford with degrees in Mathematica. Circuits? What's that? FPGAs? What's that stand for again? Been happening long enough in some places I've seen that senior management thinks it have software without coding, eletronics without soldering, and mechanisms without machining. Sad. But all rooted in laziness and an inability to handle criticism or recognize polite discouragement for what it is. No mystery.

you're possibly being sarcastic, but you;ve made a good point: you shouldn't worry about the innefficiencies unless you're fielding dozens of these things. if it's a one-off, you're going to have waste and mistakes. cost of doing business with one-of-a-kind instruments,

typing on a tablet. gimme a brake :-)