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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 172450" data-attributes="member: 2525">You know, it's nice to think that NASA's problems are because of their funding issues.  But you're lying to yourself if you think that is the cause.  Money had nothing to do with NASA's failure to convert american measurement units to metric units.  Money had nothing to do with their failure to account for time zone changes between monitoring stations.  Those were two of the major mistakes made in the last 5 years, costing BILLIONS of dollars from the NASA budget.  The people who made those mistakes were not underpaid.  The individual salaries of NASA folks are not low, and the complaint about money is always about funding additional missions, not increasing salaries to attract more intelligent employees. The problem is that NASA, as an institution, is unfortunately lazy and corrupt at this point.  Reliance on computers to make all the decisions, including basic fact checking, is an instutional issue, not a funding issue. And if you think mission decisions are made based on science, you are sadly naive.  Which missions get the okay is almost exclusively politics at this point.  Want to guess which of two missions will be backed? Find out which congressional disctricts the proposed projects will be based out of, and which aerospace companies, and you will have the data you need.  Remember, this isn't some committee composed of elder scientists studying data and making rationale, objective decisions about mission funding.  This is a government agency.  All its funding is approved through congress.  All it's leaders are political appointees.  Most of its missions are dictated in some way by military concerns.Now take the case of Beal Aerospace, and ask yourself why it is now out of business.  Don't know about the issue? Read Beal's final press release on the issue at <a href="http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0010/24beal/letter.html" target="_blank">http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0010/24beal/letter.html</a> .Nasa basically drove Beal out of the business, and don't tell me it was out of rational, non-political, objective scientific decisionmaking.  Nobody disputes that Beal was on the road to making fairly significant scientific breakthroughs.  Nope, that was all politcs.  As Beal said "We wonder where the computer industry would be today if the U.S. government had selected and subsidized one or two personal computer systems when Microsoft, Inc. or Compaq, Inc. were in their infancy."  I can tell you where....you wouldn't be reading this message right now.</blockquote>

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