NASA Parts Scroungers Resort To eBay For Parts

beggs writes: "The New York Times is running this article about NASA using ebay and other web resources to find for sale stock piles of old hardware it needs to keep the Space Shuttle fleet up and running -- things like 8086 chips from pre-PC days!" Come to think of it, this might be a better way to take care of most NASA bidding anyhow.

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Editors distort story *sigh* again

[FearUncertaintyDoubt]

Troves of old parts that NASA uncovers and buys, officials said, are used not in the shuttles themselves but in flotillas of servicing and support gear.

NASA is not so stupid as to not contract for replacement parts for the actual shuttle from subcontractors. This is just for support gear. Probably quite a bit of this gear is custom-built by NASA engineers, like programmers who build their own toolkits. As the article says, it's easier to just scrounge up a board than pay someone to redesign some piece of equipment to use updated components.

I find this hard to believe...

[bjtuna]

I remember reading somewhere, that in order to supply parts to the military or NASA, you have to contractually agree to continue producing (or be able to produce) the purchased parts for something like 30 years, because equipment like jets and space shuttles are built to have a 30 year life span. Intel, when contracted, presumably agreed that they have to be able to make an 8086 until the space shuttle is no longer used.

So either the contract has expired and the shuttles have exceeded their lifespan, or Intel has broken its contract.