I'm sorry but even taking into account the clusterf*** of government procurement this is a truly obscene price tag. Even by government standards, this is ridiculous.

It's half as much as the development of the entire flipping Space Shuttle. It's more than Apple's entire yearly R&D budget. It's more than the James Webb Space Telescope and the entire Hubble program (including operations and the repairs that were needed post-launch) combined. It's roughly the cost of 8 Mars rovers of the same type as Curiosity / Perseverance.

This is worse, even, than the Joint Strike Fighter program, which at least started out reasonably with only a pair of 1 billion dollar grants handed out to Boeing and Lockheed to develop two functional prototype fighter aircraft (never mind how the costs spiraled later).

Setting aside the question of how much it should or shouldn't cost to develop such a product, it's absolute insanity to do it with a single massive project. The DoD loves to claim in public they're trying to be more agile, and this is the exact opposite of that. This ought to have been done $100 million (or less) at a time with limited initial scope and incrementally expanding goals.

Don't make excuses for this. There is no possible justification.