I came here to say something similar but with my added first hand experience of working for a government contractor at Kennedy Space Center. Almost all of the

I came here to say something similar but with my added first hand experience of working for a government contractor at Kennedy Space Center. Almost all of the real engineering done by "NASA" at KSC is done by government contractors. The actual NASA employee pool had a higher than usual proportion of lazy and incompetent members because it's virtually impossible to terminate a federal government employee. The rest were hard core bureaucrats who spent most of their time jockeying for bigger offices, more responsibility, etc.