In this routine press release style story about NASA's Messenger probe, I caught the following which sent absolute chills down my spine.

The space probe is also interesting because its navigation team is lead by KinetX, the first private company to be responsible for navigation of a NASA deep space mission. Their experts are fully responsible for determining all trajectory adjustments throughout the probe's flight through the inner solar system ensuring that MESSENGER arrives at Mercury with the proper velocity for orbit insertion.

It is no secret that the Bush administration is filled with religious marketeers who believe fully that government fails and private industry rocks their profit driven socks. Everything this administration has done in its 7 years of failed governing (sorta doesn't help when your ideology is that you, as a governing entity, is doomed to failure) is to merge government services with parasitic, for profit corporations that have absolutely no experience or commitment to doing the job right and every motive to defrauding the government. In case you missed it, the Justice Department is only investigating 100 of 900 whistleblower complaints- of the 100, the government has recouped 13 billion that would have been sucked out of our coffers by unscrupulous, greedy fucking corporateers.

Now, the most knowledgable people on the planet relating to space is NASA, the russians over at the Cosmodrone, the ESA, ISRO (India's people) and the CNSA (the Chinese). We went to space not for profit, but for nationalistic and scientific reasons- the scientists figured out that a space race was a good way to get funding. Whatever. The only way for privately owned corporations to gain expertise is to poach the talent at any of the national agencies... you know, the ones who do the fucking hardwork of learning how to put shit up into space and and discovering the math of navigation.

Now NASA is using a private corporation of poached talent and paying them more money to do the telemetry? This is beyond senseless.
 
   

 


 
 
SaikotikGunman on
Re: Smell the Corporate
On the other hand, NASA crashed how many probes into Mars?
ravager on
Re: Smell the Corporate
And how many Apollo missions were there? NASA is the best of the best, and is only laid low if its best are poached by corporations. Its the only way for a corporation to be better than a national space agency- if it steals their workers.
SaikotikGunman on
Re: Smell the Corporate
Doesn't steal anyone.  NASA is simply not the same Cold War agency that boldly pushed the envelope.  Frankly, they don't have the real adventuresome drive or public support for it anymore.
ravager on
Re: Smell the Corporate
You don't get the logic Sai- they don't teach this stuff at university. Most of the math and the implementation of technology was done in house at NASA. The only way to argue that a private corporation has better expertise- is if they poached talent from NASA or other space agencies. There simply is no other source for telemetry training and expertise.
SaikotikGunman on
Re: Smell the Corporate
In the beginning, NASA pulled their minds from outside of the government, and even outside of our country.  Scientists don't belong to NASA.
ravager on
Re: Smell the Corporate
Scientists begged to work for NASA, because NASA had a huge budget and they could do pure research. NASA pioneered just about everything relating to space travel in competition with the Soviets. I'm not talking about ownership- I'm talking about poaching practices for profit, with a Bush administration that enables these corporate entities to siphon experienced workers from NASA in the first place to do their own jobs at inflated prices to the American taxpayer. Its ludicrous.
SaikotikGunman on
Re: Smell the Corporate
Such is life.

 
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