NASA Is Working With Private Companies to Go Back to the Moon. That ’s Riskier Than it Seems

NASA will never be listed on NASDAQ. It’s already a wholly owned subsidiary of, well, all of us—which is the way it’s supposed to be with taxpayer-funded government agencies. But you could be forgiven for thinking that the full name of NASA is actually NASA, Inc., what with all the talk in the last decade about privatizing and commercializing at least part of the work the space agency used to do by itself. NASA is pushing hard on this public-private front in its new effort to have Americans back on the moon by 2024, with three announcements in just the last two days touting all of the companies that are partnering in the latest lunar gold rush. There’s plenty of truth in all the news—but plenty of premature breathlessness, too. Begin with the fact that over the course of NASA’s entire 61-year history, it has never not been part of a public-private partnership. The only branding on the side of the space agency’s rockets and spacecraft may have been an American flag and the words “United States of America,” but if all of the companies that actually built the machines had been able to slap their decals on the ships too, there would have been no room for windows. The Apollo program alone had up to a dozen prime contractors, including North American Aviation, Grumman Corp., Rocketdyne, General Motors, IBM, Douglas Aircraft and even General Motors. Those contractors portioned out the work to so many sub-contractors in so many s...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized NASA onetime Space Source Type: news