"There were certainly things we could've done to test it and actually fire it. They would've been very time-consuming and very costly," Mike Hansen, the company's head of navigation systems, told Reuters in an interview on Saturday. "So that was a risk as a company that we acknowledged and took that risk."

What insane copium to post hoc justify not verifying your multimillion dollar machine works before crashing it.

the efficiency of the private sector folks,

Remember when everyone and their cousin mocked Russian Luna-22 probe for failing to brake and crashing into the moon?

I remember.