"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...
Anthony Garcia wrote:



Behold the Nicene Creed of NASA.
You give pretty much any major company in the United States around
1/200th of the total national budget (over 15 _billion_ dollars in FY
2004) to work with, and I think you will be downright amazed with what
they will accomplish.

Pat
[snip]
But a great deal of what "NASA" does is actually done by contractors
working for NASA, be it Shuttle upkeep and refurbishment, unmanned
launch vehicle construction, or building equipment for space and
planetary probes- so NASA really _is_ major and minor aerospace related
firms when you look at it.

How convenient, and silly of a distinction. As it happens few companies
.... very few companies don't have to contract SOMETHING out. When
producing an end product no one goes to a contractor/mfg firm and say's
this doesn't count because you contracted the work out. Do some research
and you most certainly need to come to that conclusion. Do you think
Boeing makes air frames, jet engines, fuel pumps, hydraulic pumps,
computers, etc, etc, etc. NOT!!! The same is true of ANY manufacturer of
end products. NASA being a government agency is best described as a
contractor.

Any private company given the task of putting a comsat into orbit is .....
you guessed it ... a contractor. ;-))



General Electric -- 134 Billion FY2003 Annual Report
Lockheed-Martin --- 31.8 Billion FY2003 Annual Report (Net Sales ;; a
highly massaged figure)
HP/Compaq --- 19.5 Billion expecte annual revenue (Annual report not
released yet.)

The interesting thing here is that these are the company's revenues,
NASA doesn't really have any annual revenues, as it costs far, far, more
to fund than any small amount of money it might bring in annually
through sales of its research information and patent rights on any of
its new equipment or processes... in fact, its not _supposed_ to make a
profit, but freely distribute everything that it invents or discovers.
[snip]

Call it revenues, call it funding, call it grants it all represents
resources allocated to an agency/private company with the goal of
producing an end result. It doesn't matter if it is tax $$ or investor
$$. The process for getting funding for projects is in most corporations
very much like it is in government. You have an idea, you run it by some
people. They like the idea and you then put proposals together, prepare
studies showing feasibility, sell, sell sell the idea; finally perhaps you
might get all the signatures you need to spend the money the board decides
to allocate toward this fantastic idea. Again your distinction between
revenue and ... well revenue; in this case NASA gets the $$$ for filling
it's mission of putting golf balls into space.