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NASA's Finances in Disarray
mwolff writes "Yahoo News has an article about the 'financial disarray' NASA seems to be in after a recent audit showed horrible documentation of funding. 'As NASA sets course for the moon and Mars, the space agency's finances are in disarray, with significant errors in its last financial statements and inadequate documentation for $565 billion posted to its accounts, its former auditor reported.'"
Does this mean I won't be getting my flying car this year?
NASA = Need A Second Accountant!
NASA: "The 360 ate our paper tape"
- Sherman
All the more reason for private companies to get into the space business. I'm not saying that private companies can't cook the books, but at least there's laws in place to handle that.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
$565 billion posted to its accounts?!?
With that kind of cash, screw Mars, let's go straight to Europa.
"They can send a man to the moon, but they can't balance the damn checkbook?"
I clicked on it and I was pretty sure it was a candid shot of the NASA accounting department.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I'm wondering when the first lawsuit comes up of sites that post links that other sites are posting. Know of any sites that just post everyones stories?
NASA's whole budget request for 2004 was 15.5 billion.
At that rate, it'd take them oh, say 40 years to save up 500+ billion.
Something does not compute.
Unless someone accidentally used different monetary units...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Well, in 1999 they got about 14 bil for the year but invested it in dot-coms and made a killing. Well, they started spending and spending thinking they had 500+ billion in the bank and before they knew it, the bubble burst and they were stuck with a shit load of bills and no way to cover the tab. Obviously embarrassed they bet it all on pets.com and toys.com, they tried to cover it up in hopes they could maybe make it back on the World Tour of Poker, but they quickly realized the 1 million dollar pot just wouldn't cut it. So here we are, 500+ billion in debt and not even a pack of Astronaut Ice Cream to show for it. And that sock puppet was so damn cool, you *knew* that stock had to be a winner.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
"If their MONEY calculations are in such condition, how do their spaceships even rise off the ground?"
Apparently by the explosive combustion of billions of small, unmarked bills crammed into the fuel tank.
Please don't tell me they forgot to convert from Yen (or Euro) to USD.
Not that NASA would be so stupid as to forget to convert units....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
All that cash and they couldn't make a better movie?
Damn, wish I had mod points today :-D
They should all be using metric money. Rather than a half dollar, quarter dollar, eighth dollar, etc. switch to cents where it's all a nice 1/100th of a dollar for each unit.
Come on America, catch up with the rest of the world here!
I'm guessing some people will be sitting through a very unpleasant meeting.
Boss : "So you guys managed to lose track of half a trillion dollars?"
How do you answer that question?
$565 billion here. $565 billion there. Pretty soon you're talking about real money.
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
I hope your clipboard didn't contain anything you didn't want this guy to see.
Heh, what a stupid troll the original was, then. Making people copy and paste the link just before stealing their clipboard text. Duuuuh.
I copied about 16 megs of random letters and numbers and tried going to that link a few times, just for good measure.