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



Are you truely sure of that. A great many U.S. companies, and foreign
companies do in fact have revenues of greater than 1/200th of the U.S.
annual budget.

1/200th of 15 Billion is ONLY 75 Million. The mid-sized company I work
for does better than that!!!

NASA's budget is 15 billion. Boy, I _would_ be impressed if they did
what they do on only 75 million a year; that's around 1/8th the price
of a Shuttle flight.

The proposed budget for 2004 is of the order
of 2.2 TRILLION. Even then, the bar for meeting your criteria for
amazement is pretty low since many of our major companies have revenues of
greater than 15 Billion.

Examples abound:

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.

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.
Around 25 years ago, I heard a former NASA scientist come up with a
really novel idea- NASA should make a profit on both it's
telecommunication satellite launches, and develop a constellation of
earth-resource, weather, and imaging satellites, whose products would
then be sold to whoever is interested- with the moneys thus realized,
NASA could afford to run a modest exploration program at _zero_ taxpayer
expense. But of course we aren't going to do that...we aren't going to
launch space tourists like the Russians, build imaging satellites whose
data is for sale like the French, or sell advertising space on the side
of the Shuttle's ET Like many corporations would surely buy... our hands
shall remain clean; and completely unsullied by profit.

Pat
(Picturing a Mars rover imbedding a sign on the Martian surface reading:
"Future home of a McDonald's Restaurant- over 1 billion served...on
Earth alone.")