When someone from Britain speaks, Americans hear a "British accent"...

[Charles Krug]

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 15:46:34 -0500, Terry Hancock
<hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 08 October 2005 04:35 am, Steve Holden wrote:
>> I must have been working at NASA at the time; they are well known for 
>> embiggening prices.
> 
> Not nearly as much as the DoD, from what I hear.
> 
> Truthfully, I think those stories are bit exaggerated -- I think the
> real problem is somebody making a bad make/buy decision. They decide
> to make something that they could easily have bought at the hardware
> store.
> 

Typically, it was a $30 hammer with $270 worth of paperwork attached.

The famous "$10k Toilet Seat" is actually a bit of an interesting tale.

The part in question is the toilet from a C5A transport . . not
something you can purchase at the local Home Depot.

Being an aircraft toilet, it's crammed into a tiny space and has to be
as light as possible and all the things you associate with aircraft
toilets.

When they were speccing the project, the airframe manufacturer included
some number of spare toilet seats in the bid, given the expected life of
the airframe.  Some faceless bureaucrat decided that they didn't NEED
any spare toilet seats and cancelled that line item.

Lo and Behold, they eventually needed spare toilet seats.  But because
of Another Good Regulation (tm) the tooling had been recycled.

Recreating the tooling to make the spares was, amortized over the number
ordered, around $10k/seat.  Compared to the tooling costs, subsequent
orders of the same seat are pretty much "free" . . . at least until some
bozo in Ring A decides to toss the tooling again.