Building things can be difficult. At least it is for me. My variable power source I built out of a kit does work. The scanner I tried to build from parts never did work. "The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind" http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/williamkamkwamba/book.html is an excellent account of What Can Happen If You Try. This attempted shuttle is just sad. They could build a nice glider with what they have to work with, perhaps. A glider would be a fine thing to have built.

"Experiments don’t fail. They give us information. Maybe that information is telling us that dropping our flask on the ground was not a good idea. Data collected. Lesson learned. Next experiment." -from http://www.benchfly.com/blog/ten-ways-to-be-a-successful-scientist/ You are right about the "guinea pig" thing, though.