Don't rule out the design/development of other planes in US arsenal. The F-35 is just in the news here this week (yeserday maybe) about it being a meh plane because of the bureaucratic process. The Air Force project seems to be an outlier and definitely not the norm.

That’s true, though given this success, hopefully they can name it the norm going forward.

I'd love that as well, but research projects are very very very different from actual huge contracts. Especially with how politically engineered supply chain has to be in USA. And changing that isn't technical challenge - it's political one, and no one will dare to do it.

The F35 is a primarily a sink for public cash that happens to fly. There is literally no incentive to make these projects cheap, fast, and economically streamlined.

The lifetime cost is projected to be $1.7tn. Someone is getting very rich off that.

For comparison, the entire Manhattan Project cost the equivalent of $30bn in modern money.

> The lifetime cost is projected to be $1.7tn. Someone is getting very rich off that.

Tons of people are getting rich off that, and tons of people are being elected for the office. Military spending is one of the biggest government welfare programs in USA.