...and if Franklin Roosevelt hadn't socked the minimum wage to us, we might still have a hundred aerospace companies today competing instead of Lock-mart. Building spacecraft and rockets is not an inexpensive pursuit. When the belt-tightenings come the aerospace companies are forced to throw themselves on their sword and some other soldier picks up their weapons and move on.

The military-industrial complex only has unseemly power when lobbyists can blackmail contracting agents and Congress due to a limited selection of capable firms. I'm sure some contracting agents fantasize about being able to say, "Scr-- this! Your guys proposal is ridiculously long, a magnitude of 100 times too expensive and just a stratospheric pile of cr--, there's no way in he-- you're ever getting this contract."

Yeah that'll happen real soon!

In reality Lock-mart and Boeing are now the closest thing to socialist style defense firms - linked to the government at the elbow. Quality & timeliness way down, dollars and number of projects way up.

Bush is weighing all the options and looking outside the NASA box - just wait and see. I'm sure we'll see some sort of big space announcement by Christmas time.

SDAI-Tech1