Sure, but that put their bid 10% above the bid of the guys who just ran FEA on it and said "she'll be right."
The article does talk about "land testing" so I assume they have a mock-up somewhere in the desert to test this stuff in a place where failure doesn't send the pilot/plane into the ocean.
I think the problem is that they were still testing these technologies at the same time that they were building the ship, so now there's only so far they can go in modifying them from their original assumptions while still staying withing the power/space/layout specifications the ship was designed around.
Either they will do that, or simply cut corners and fail to report it accurately. This will fly under the radar until some tragedy. But the root cause of that will likely be covered up too.
From the article:
> It was also supposed to increase the lifespan of aircraft by putting less stress on their airframes. Unfortunately, recent tests of land-based prototypes showed that the system actually overstressed F-18 airframes during launch.
How do they just now discover that? Nobody thought to build a prototype on land first before agreeing to put it on a carrier?
It sounds like some defense contractors sold a bunch of neat ideas to the Navy and decided they'd work the kinks out as they came up.
The other problem is that there just aren't many companies that build aircraft carriers, and it's a very small market. According to Wikipedia there are only 37 aircraft carriers in the whole world, so nobody's going to do the R&D if they're not getting funded to do it.