Rick Jones wrote:
Pat Flannery wrote:
One of the basic problems was the retention of the Stalinist concept
of having at least two design bureaus working on any project in
direct competition to each other, each trying to undermine the other
in the eyes of the government and seize their competitor's funding.

Sounds like competitive U.S. Military procurement procedures. Do we
have an airborn refueling tanker deal yet?


This got a lot more severe; about the closest thing we had to it in our
space program was McDonnell pitching all sorts of modified Gemini
variants in competition to Apollo till NASA told them to cut that crap
out: http://www.astronautix.com/articles/bygemoon.htm

Pat