The sad thing is that the tool bag probably had tools in it that have a $10 Craftsman equivalent. Maybe the coating that made them not brittle at absolute zero would be different, but I find it very difficult to believe that the $100k wasn’t mostly waste.
You said — “The sad thing is that the tool bag probably had tools in it that have a $10 Craftsman equivalent. Maybe the coating that made them not brittle at absolute zero would be different, but I find it very difficult to believe that the $100k wasn’t mostly waste.”
I seriously doubt that the $100,000 toolbag (if that’s what it did cost, and I don’t know that for sure) — was a waste. I think that whatever tools that they had (and I don’t even know that..., so it could become obvious once one knows that), that they had to meet whatever specifications that NASA demanded, and that bids were put out for contractors to come up with a price for whatever bid items that NASA had.
And so — if Ace Hardware could have bid a lot lower, I’m sure they would have won the bid... LOL...