<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>then they need to quit funding the counrties outside the us<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />They spend very little of their budget outside the US. There are pretty substantial roadblocks to discourage them from doing so. (ITAR, for instance.) They genuinely hire abroad only when they absolutely need to.<br /><br />They have, however, paid to put their own instruments on other spacecraft, have accepted funds from abroad to put foreign instruments on NASA spacecraft, and have actually built instruments on contract to foreign interests. ESA and JAXA are their most common partners in that; the Iran Non-Proliferation Act means it takes an act of Congress to pay Russia for anything. Certain political interests have encouraged international cooperation; the theory has long been that a Mars mission (or any such hugely ambitious mission) would be easier if it were international. Nowdays, I am less sure of that; the beaurocracy may be reaching the point where international cooperation is getting negative returns, at least on the really big, complicated stuff.<br /><br />Of course, another thing a lot of people forget with NASA is what the "A" stands for. Aeronautics. They aren't just manned spaceflight, and they're not just unmanned spaceflight. They're also about aviation. NASA has done a great deal of work advancing the state of the art in civil aviation over the past 25 years. Their work on fly-by-wire systems for the Space Shuttle have proven invaluable, paving the way for fly-by-wire on airliners. It was the Shuttle Approach and Landing Test program (with Enterprise) that solved the "porpoising" problem that had plagued military fly-by-wire systems; the solutions for Enterprise rapidly entered the industry. A really cool advancement on that is a recent product of NASA: a fly-by-wire system that can enable an airliner to use differential thrust for attitude control with only minimal modification of the aircra <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>