From: Dani Eder (danielravennest@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue May 02 2006 - 19:12:03 MDT
> NASA is a political animal. It's currently
> operating as a designed
> loser. I don't know why, but this has seemed
> obvious for decades.
I agree it is a political animal, but one designed
to maintain jobs in certain congressional districts.
After Apollo, NASA's budget declined by 2/3 in
real dollars, and not one NASA center closed.
The Air Force Space Command manages a similar
budget to NASA's with about 1/4 the people.
When the mission control center in Houston was
upgraded from 1970's technology to control the
Shuttle to 1990's technology to control the
Shuttle + Space Station, the number of people
working there remained _exactly_ the same (604
before, 604 after). That doesn't happen by
chance.
The space station project itself was originally
set up as 3 prime contractors working under 3
NASA centers. It was a hellishly poor way to
organize a project, but it distributed the project
funds in more congessional districts that way.
Eventually Boeing became the sole prime contractor
by buying Rocketdyne and McDonnell-Douglas, but
there are still 3 NASA centers involved.
They feel they have to do things this way because
it's required to get funding, but it's a poor
way to spend the taxpayer's dollars.
DRN
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:56 MDT