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Some would call that an organizational failure. I suppose it depends on the budgets.
by physicalecon 2mo ago
Some would call that an organizational failure. I suppose it depends on the budgets.
- antoniojtorres 2mo agoThere’s money to go around!
- physicalecon 2mo ago[dead]
- jvanderbot 2mo agoOne problem with these kinds of organizations, is that there effectively is no "budget" other than what the various contracted work declares. A subcontractor like, say, Raytheon gets to charge a fixed % "burden"/overhead and spend that largely however they want. These "burden" funded tasks at JPL were the exclusive use of new research tasks (ostensibely), or pet projects of political superstars (like the mars copter). At any rate, they were highly scrutinized and could not be used to offset mission costs (otherwise JPL would have an unfair advantage when bidding for missions vs other NASA centers, simply b/c JPL had many more sources of funding vs other centers). So, those who would do less ostentatious work like encoding command sequences for aging spacecraft had to find a day job.